Flame Guns revisited...

[ffutures]

Getting back to flame pistols again

http://ffutures.livejournal.com/522696.html

I've somehow got to get enough energy from a small cheap diamond to zap an immense amount of the countryside, and bond energy simply doesn't cut it - it would be about as much as you'd get from burning the diamond or a similarly sized lump of coal with a blowtorch.

Does carbon fusion (as seen in supernovas) seem even faintly plausible as the energy source?

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Carbon-fusion works well too, perhaps some variant that only works with Weinbaumverse physics; perhaps something that might work in our physics too but hasn't yet been discovered (it's getting pretty obvious that positionally-catalyzed fusion is possible, though we haven't yet hammered out a theory to explain how and why).

Containment only has to be good enough to work for a very short while, since the flame gun is essentially a directed explosion. If it flamed for a long while, Newtonian reaction would harm (or at least rapidly move) the firer.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

This works pretty well with the idea that the barrels will conk out more often than not. Obviously the containment fails a microsecond too early.