BTW, anyone know why just hitting it would cause the munitions to go off?
Picnic Acid. Very unstable.
IIRC, I read the blast blew all the water out of the Bay.
It wasn’t a violent collision, but enough to topple barrels of airplane fuel carried on deck. The resultant fire is what set off the cargo of TNT and pyric acid.
Fuel and the acid acted as the oxidizer.
The explosion didn’t happen right away, the two ships scraped each other for several minutes, causing a friction fire that set off the cargo.
BTW, Halifax was very carefully studied in the 1940s re: urban blast effects by the Hiroshima bombing planners, as it was the largest single explosion up to that point.
Boom.
The Japanese used it as the primary charge in their WW2 knee mortar round. They had to line the case with ceramic, to prevent the reaction during storage. They stopped using the ceramic, late in the war, to cut costs and speed up production. It's why, if you see the juice can sized shells while wreck diving, you don't touch, or you may vanish, in between blinks...
>> BTW, anyone know why just hitting it would cause the munitions to go off? <<
2,500-tons of TNT and picric acid is a lot of explosives.
The TNT could probably take the jolt but the picric acid is almost as touchy a nitroglycerine. Bump it and it will detonate.
Picric acid is what is used in percussion caps for bullets. It detonates on impact. As someone said, it is very unstable.
You can make it with metal filings and stale urine but that is not the commercial process.