Fertilizer-Repurposed Gunpowder

[Core Room]

"Mint, loading explosives onto drones for a saturation attack is difficult, you said."

"Drones have to be assembled entirely by hand from partwork-encyclopedia parts, so we can't field them in numbers. Besides, the aide-de-camp scribe is the one better versed in making explosives from fertilizer."

"It isn't as though I'm well versed in it either. The dungeon's unique law forbids the use of fire, which is a strength in that the fertilizer bomb won't explode mid-compounding. But supposing we make the gunpowder, the question is how to use it."

"That's exactly where enlarging the self-destruct drone comes in."

"Director, a fixed-wing craft has trouble taking off from a runway, so, like a multicopter, it's better to glide it down from the dungeon roof. Either way, a flying object loaded with explosives crashing near the dungeon is dangerous. And to load enough gunpowder for lethal force, the airframe grows large and becomes a nuisance to handle."

"As for a cheap explosive…"

"Master, the simplest is a landmine. Turn the entire outer perimeter, apart from the highway, into a minefield, and the pirates would have a hard time getting in. The problems are that the number required becomes enormous, that children would step on them by mistake, and that removing them afterward is, at the current level of technology, effectively impossible."

"That's a problem. No, a serious problem."

"Next up is a multiple-launch rocket launcher: stuff explosive into iron pipes and fire primitive fire-arrows, in other words rockets. They have no killing power unless they score a direct hit, so they're for driving the enemy off. If we had a knight order, we could also use them this way: a cavalry charge into the chaos where they land."

"The moment you go to guided rockets, the difficulty shoots right up."

"In the end it comes down to the unguided kind, the sort guerrillas and terrorists use. The effective range of a bow or a matchlock is somewhere around 100 to 200 meters, and the maximum range doesn't exceed 500 meters, so taking the range as 500 meters, even a 10-degree deviation puts you 50 meters off target. We'd have to fire at least 100 rounds simultaneously. Fire them all perfectly at once and they'd collide in midair, so we stagger them and rain them down in volleys. Mint, can you manage it?"

"If you ask whether I can do something on that order, then, well, I can, but…"

"Guns and cannons would be more useful, but at present they'd be difficult. Matchlocks and large-bore guns at least probably exist somewhere out there, I'd think."

"Aide-de-camp scribe, I've never seen one, but I wonder if there's some problem with producing gunpowder."

"Master, since we have no 'industrial base,' a knight order seems the most useful for exterminating pirates. Rāja, how does the procedure for forming a knight order work?"

"A knight order itself is established and appointed by a state or by the Pope. However, Japan has no secular knight orders."

"Rāja, what about a Takeda Knight Order, or a Sanada Knight Order…?"

"Those aren't knight orders under international law, and they aren't ordinarily called knight orders. They're positioned as elite shock troops, so if you mean 'knight order' in that sense, then in Europe too there are examples of kings and great nobles forming them during the period before the sovereign-state system was established."