Strangeness ALERT!

When you are cooking explosives, you make an extended test against a threshold which varies based on what you are trying to do. Lets say you desire to make some High-Grade plastic explosives, say.... C-10. Unfortunately, you only have a chemistry kit not a lab, but you a a former chemistry grad student and mad bomber, so your dice pool for the activity is 11 (-2 for inadequate tools).

Now, the cost of C-10 normally is 1,000 . The cost of the materials to MAKE C-10 (according to Arsenal) is 1,500 . This is strange thing #1. So clearly, cooking your own explosives looks like a bad financial deal at first glance. BUT WAIT!

When you make the extended test to cook the explosives, every extra hit increases either the rating of what you are making, or increases the quantity. Since this is an extended test, can you buy a single unit of cheap materials and just keep rolling until you have accumulated the successes for the quality and quantity you want?

For example, lets say my above mad bomber decides he needs 5 kg of C-6 for his bomb, but has only 600 . He goes out and buys 1 unit of rating 4 plastic explosives materials. He then gets to work. For simplicity and safety he buys successes (1/4 dice pool). So every "roll" gives him 2 "hits". Six rolls gets him to the threshold of 12. From there he has three more rolls (6 hits) before he runs out of dice rolls (under the optional rule limiting him to a max of dice pool roles). He uses those six successes to bump the quality up by two and the quantity up by 4 (to 5).

Seems kinda odd, unless you make it so you can't keep rolling after you get to the threshold, but that can lead to some weirder behavior, like the guy who just makes it winding up with a worse result then the guy ho just fails to make it one hour, then goes WAY over the threshold the next hour.

I don't know, just seems odd to me.

If the GM wishes to allow it he can, if he wants a limiter he simply uses the (optional) limit on rolls that's part of the Extended Test writeup.

With regard to pricing I'd find it odd if you could make a product cheaper than a Corp can produce it in industrial quantities, with huge amounts of automation, contacts in the suppliers of the raw materials etc ...

if you were making an inferior knock off using alternate materials sure, possibly cheaper (assuming it works) in my eyes you are looking mostly at the fact that its harder to trace, possibly identify depending if chemicals are present in different quantities / not present at all...

Not sure about the other stuff as I haven't read Arsenal yet.

Oh and thanks to the handy mod who closed the copy of the thread I was posting in

I'd be surprised if the book lists wholesale prices.


This is a flaw with getting bonuses from extended tests, however. You could argue that you should only look at the sum total of the test, not at how productive each individual hour is. So if you get 1 success for four hours, then 18 hours, just say it took you a bit longer than you intended, but you did really super well. I would *NOT* let people extend out a test past the 'success' stage. Once you succeed, you may be able to make another test to upgrade the substance, but that's a different set of rules.

My feeling would be the most obvious control is that people who make homemade explosives tend to blow up. To quote a bomb squad guy: "The critical mass for any homemade explosive is never less than one-half bucket full". So don't glitch. It would be bad.

#1:

Economy of scale. the factory that makes c10 makes hundreds of tons a year, and purchases chemicals in bulk, and makes batches in bulk. thus it is cheaper per pound to sell.

Then, if you don't mind me asking: what the the fragging point in home-cooking explosives? The availabilities on explosives are not rating dependent, and not overly high. Why include rules in the book that are of no practical use?

In the real world what you said might be true for explosives on the legal market. However if some bozo wanted to get some plastic explosives and had no license or legitimate reason to get them, the cost would be substantially above the legitimate retail price to account for the risk to those in the distribution chain to him getting arrested for selling dangerous explosives to a mad bomber like he is. In previous editions this was represented by street index.

This is not some guy cooking up nitro in his bathtub. The example given is an experienced chemist. His odds of botching are minimal given his dice pool.

Explosive purchases can be traced while the purchase of some basic chemicals from different shops on different days from different areas of town might be hard to group together and target.

Runners employ explosives all the time, and most don't cook their own. If being traced via explosive residue was such a big problem, then runners would not use explosives without additional safeguards. There has to be a better reason to cook your own that justifies a 50% price premium on something that is already very expensive.

The rules have the weirdness where you can get extra output seemingly without extra materials on the input side (by allocating extra successes.) So the price MAY be below retail, if you read the rules that way, but as per my original post that has it's own strange effects.

As I mentioned in my original post. Still results in some strange effects.

The home-grown chemist may have substantially reduced costs on aspects other than ingredients, though. No regulations and inspections to make sure his factory and product is safe. No insurance premiums on the equipment. No liability or shipping insurance, either. No wages of highly-trained chemists and safety engineers. It really depends on the nature of the industry just how well economies of scale work for you, and I think explosives have a lot of costs other than basic ingredients to consider.

That said, the OP is right -- that's a broken way to handle the test. It leaves two basic situations:

1) The skill of the chemist might allow people to turn cheap, low-rating goo into dozens of kilograms of high-rated explosives.
2) The skill of the chemist is completely irrelevant, once he meets the basic threshold. After that, it's luck if your chemicals result in a large amount of good stuff, or a small amount of weaker stuff.

I'm not too fond of either option, personally.

Disclaimer: I don't have Arsenal, and so I haven't read the rules in print. I'm basing my opinion on the OP.

It would be substantially easier to simply list sell precursor materials in according to the mole, define the reaction series leading from the precursor chemicals to the final explosive, and calculate explosive power relative to the mole rather than to the kilogram, particularly since there should be a lower limit on explosive mass of 1 molecule*(molecular mass) which the current explosive rules to not imply.

is it wrong that I am now wondering how many dice an entire plant turned over to producing explosives rolls?

yeah thats a base TN of 4, 65,000 dice ... you use 15 kilo's of raw materials and produce 4 tons of premium c10