Quote:
Originally Posted by Avatar_notADV
Well, HE damage isn't the same thing as AP damage when it comes to penetrating armor. ;p
Of course, if you wanted to, you could say that cartridges aren't explosive - that they're juiced up in a magical process, but they aren't just little packets of mana waiting for a firing pin, and unless they're "fired" in the proper manner, they don't explode. Think powergun ammo from Hammers' Slammers - there's lots of ways to bend, fold, spindle, and mutilate those cartridges without causing them to gang-fire, though that's possible under the right conditions.
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Of course, I DON'T want to.
One, I find cartridges being 'handle with care' safety issues something to give them flare asside from just being 'ammo'.
Two, I'm three chapters and something like fifty thousand words past the scene where I apply them, and a chapter or two ahead of where I first threw in the Checkov's Gun on it. Changing it now would require to change the dialogue of the early scene. (After I find it.) And then rewriting the entire end sequence of chapter four.
Now of course, I don't treat them like grenades waiting to happen. But I make it known in the fic that Cartridges and high intensity Microwaves don't particularly get along.
In fact, catagorizing the punishment I give them. Damaging the magazine doesn't set them off, but it makes RH reject the thing for safety purposes, and even blasted and beaten up they don't go off. Microwaves of course, arc them...
And then I treat the detonation like some kind of incindiary. If one blows, it takes out whatever's near it, and sprays 'sparks' of raw mana all over the place. The sparks themselves behave like superheated molten fragments, torching whatever they touch. (It's raw energy, what do you expect. It's just that it's magic energy so it behaves rather odd. In this case staying in 'spark's rather than just radiating out in a flash of light.) So of course, when one of these sparks lands on or very near another cartridge, they melt it. Boom^2.