"Hexanitro? Say what? I'd call for all the chemists who've ever worked with a hexanitro compound to raise their hands, but that might be assuming too much about the limb-to-chemist ratio."
If you weren't to start with, you might well be by the end (i.e., momentarily). Or pieces of you would be at any rate; ΔV to the Kármán line is only a few km/s.
> Plenty of other hypothetical polynitrogen species turn out to have basically no barrier at all by comparison, which is why they’re still hypothetical, and you will be too if you try to make them on any kind of scale.
Derek references his “Things I Won’t Work With” set of posts. If you haven’t read them before you’re in for a treat: https://www.science.org/action/doSearch?AllField=%22Things+I...
This sums it up nicely:
"Hexanitro? Say what? I'd call for all the chemists who've ever worked with a hexanitro compound to raise their hands, but that might be assuming too much about the limb-to-chemist ratio."
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/things-i-won-t-wor...
Also
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44285875 ("Preparation of a neutral nitrogen allotrope hexanitrogen C2h-N6 (nature.com)"—27 comments)
I’m assuming this would not be a practical explosive material to work with, based on what I read, unless you were working off-world.
If you weren't to start with, you might well be by the end (i.e., momentarily). Or pieces of you would be at any rate; ΔV to the Kármán line is only a few km/s.
> Plenty of other hypothetical polynitrogen species turn out to have basically no barrier at all by comparison, which is why they’re still hypothetical, and you will be too if you try to make them on any kind of scale.
Classic. I love this guy's sense of humor.