I finally found a chemistry textbook and unlocked the chemistry system.
Yikes.
What's the go with black gunpowder? Why can it be crafted from oxidizer powder (which I'm assuming is ammonium perchlorate from the crafting ingredients), lye powder (which I have to assume is the more historic classification for potassium hydroxide and not the more proper nomenclature for nitrogen hydroxide), and charcoal (carbon)? Where the heck is the sulfur in this formula? Isn't this a formula for sulfur-free gunpowder, a.k.a. smokeless powder?
I'd assume this reaction is 6 KNO3 + C7H4O → 3 K2CO3 + 4 CO2 + 2 H2O + 3 N2 for the ignition. So you're making potassium nitrate from the potassium hydroxide and ammonium percholate ingredients, producing perchloric acid and oxygen gas as a byproduct? That's... well, it's not actually smokeless powder, but it's still not black powder. Although yes, the carbon content would make it black, but stop being pedantic about my pedantry, dammit! It's not my fault the nomenclature fails to account for the proper nuance. Plus, good luck producing prismenal from charcoal without significant industrial purification methods.
Also, from my play, I note a significant lack of methods of obtaining sulfur. Honestly, the game needs a few methods of extracting sulfur from every day ingredients.
Did you know that until recently, most laundry detergents used sodium sulfate to bulk their product? It's because it's the garbage left over from more useful reactions involving sulfuric acid, such as the Mannheim or Hargreaves process. Just dump it in laundry powder and the plebs will pay you for your garbage.
It's usually between 40-60% of the detergent's content by mass, too.
You can mix sodium sulfate in water and precipitate the sodium out of the liquid by leading a mixture of chlorine gas and sulfur dioxide gas through the liquid. Once you do this, you have hydrochloric acid and sulfuric acid in the solution, which can be boiled off and collected separately, leaving behind whatever other crud was in the stuff.
If you're interested,
here's the original patent from 1946 for this process.
Seems like a decent option for a crafting recipe to produce sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, and salt, plus whatever you wanna call the leftover detergent scum, be it soapy water, soap flakes or whatnot. You'd need a method of capturing and storing chlorine and sulfur dioxide gas though, which shouldn't be too hard. The recipe for lye from salt water in the game is already supposed to produce chlorine gas (it's using the chloralkali process) and you can produce sulfur dioxide by heating metallic sulfides. Hint:
most common disposable batteries use lithium-iron sulfide as their ingredients.
Anyway, the chemistry system could stand some fine tuning.
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Topic: Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (Read 114359 times)