Official Chemistry Thread (Cogwerks)

[Cogwerks]

Being able to make chlorine would be an interesting way to rust cyborgs. splash it on them and they take whatever damage it is that cyborgs take. Too much of it, or a killing blow with it, should turn the cyborg sprite into a rusty red one that can't move at all. The drawback is that if a human inhales it, they take heavy toxic damage as well. Mixing it with ammonia would create extremely volatile hydrogen gas.

You know chlorine is already one of the starting chemicals in the dispenser, right? It just doesn't do much in game other than a bit of tox damage. Chlorine smoke hurts you, but perhaps not as much as it should, since straight up chlorine gas was one of the primary weapons in early chemical warfare. Hydrogen is in the dispenser too, but it doesn't really do anything on its own. Maybe it should.

And that thing with ammonia, you've got that reaction wrong. The reason it's bad to mix bleach (NaOCl) with ammonia (NH3) is because you get a bunch of chloramine, nitrogen trichloride (explosive) and hydrazine (even more explosive). Those fun exothermic reactions there can yield a nice boiling hot mess of tear gas and other toxic compounds.

Reacting straight chlorine to NH3 looks like it makes a pretty similar mess of ammonium chlorides, nitrogen trichlorides, hydrochloric acid and/or liberated nitrogen, not liberated hydrogen. Free hydrogen isn't really that big of a problem anyways.