“Hola, Snake-Eyes! About time you showed up! I got some new kit for you, girl.”
The roughly human-shaped pile of rags which had just entered the workshop continued beating the last of the dust from itself. After removing a small mummy’s worth of wrappings and various sub-garments, eventually a human head and face emerged - a very filthy female human face.
“Sorry, Q-Bert,” announced this apparition, ”I got here as fast as I could when I got your wave, but Mother wanted to see me as soon as I got in. I haven’t even eaten yet, and you know why? Because number one, I am excited as fuck about whatever this new kit is because every fuckin’ time I caome back you surprise me with something new and impossible and amazing, and number two, I can’t wait for us to fuck because every time we do you surprise me with something new and impossible and amazing.”
The apparition paused for breath, before they both burst into laughter and grabbed each other in something resembling a mutual bear hug combined with a short wrestling matching or possibly an epileptic-like fit of groping.
“Okay,” said Q-bert after they came up for air, “food first. Here, eat this. It’s my lunch, and I didn’t finish it, because I was busy putting the finishing touches on THIS.”
He hoisted something made of polished steel which strongly resembled a pneumatic demolition hammer, if said tool were missing its drill and had been designed by NASA.
“Lhoochx Chooll,” pronounced Snake-Eyes around a mouthful of something she tried not to dwell on, as she somehow juggled eating the proferred and alleged “sandwich” with one hand, and continuing to divest layers of clothing with the other.
Despite their demonstrated tenderness, she tended to back away from Q-bert while she did this, because the unwrapping process was accompanied by a continuous shower of dust.
“I mean ‘looks cool’,” she continued more clearly. And then after staring at it for a few more seconds, she added, “uh, what’s it do?”
“This my dear, is an entrained-abrasive, coaxial jet, ruby-orifice water jet with an effective cutting length of over ten inches.”
“Uh, that’s cool. I recognized most of those words, I think. Now, what does it DO?” shot back the woman.
She had finally divested approximately seventeen layers of dust-saturated fabric, each layer lighter colored than the last, until the inner layer was revealed as white, whereas the dust on the floor, and the outer five layers of her wrappings, were a brown-ish tan so unremarkable and boring, it spoke of pure distilled essence of desolation just by its drab and utterly information-free color.
She had perched on a transparent plastic crate of small glass globes labeled “DANGER: SPONTANEOUS POLYMERIZATION”, and was sniffing a clear bottle of clear liquid. “Is this, or is this not, pure grain alcohol?”
“Well, yeah, but-”
“got anything nasty in it?”
“No, but-”
Snake-Eyes upended the bottle and washed down her lunch with a gulp.
Q-Bert tried to look offended. “Go easy on that!, it’s all I have, and it’s for degreasing parts, not for - well shit, hold up, at least give me a slug too, if you’re going to get shit-faced.”
“Okay, so what this is, is a very powerful industrial cutting device, kind of exotic, but capable of doing fantastic things... briefly.
“They are called water jets, and in their simplest form, you just squirt water through a tiny hole - about a thousandth of an inch in diameter or maybe a few thousandths, depending on the purpose and design, under ridiculously high pressures - tens of thousands of pounds per square inch. This is higher than the pressure in a SCUBA tank - it’s higher than you can achieve with normal pumps.
“That water jet moves so fast, and
acts on such a very small area, that simple water can cut a lot of
materials very quickly - even steel, eventually. That means you can’t
make your exit nozzle out of steel - the stream will cut it too,
enlarging it quickly. Special nozzles were made out of ruby and
diamond, which last longer, but even those eventually have to be
replaced.
“However, there is another trick that takes these water jets to a whole other level. We can add abrasive powder to the water stream. The grit is hard to make smaller than a thousandth of an inch, but it can be done, and the nozzle can be enlarged a fair bit without hurting its cutting ability much.
“But now the grit wants
to erode the exit nozzle. There is a solution to that too... but I can
see your eyes glazing over, so I’m gonna cut to the chase.”
“So yeah - it’s fairly simple in concept, but tough to do... without having it all explode in your face, or require a truck-load of equipment to power it, that is. My design is portable, but it will only run for two minutes and then you have to stop and reload it. It’s less of a weapon and more of a super-tool.
“It works like this: it’s nothing but a titanium cylinder with high grade steel end caps and some sturdy handles. Titanium just to save weight, because the internal pressure is over fifty thousand PSI when it’s triggered. Most of the cylinder is full of water, which is gelled and arranged in two coaxial layers - the outer one pure water, the central one, water-loaded grit. At the rear is a piston, and behind the piston is a small air space and a pyrotechnic charge.
“When you pull the trigger, the charge turns back into various hot gases - mostly nitrogen, which pressurize the space behind the piston and begin forcing the water out the front. The shockwave which travels through the water destroys the fragile cross-links of the gelling additive, which is only about 1% by weight, leaving the water essentially a simple liquid ready to be ejected.
“The coaxial arrangement of the two solutions means that the grit is squeezed to the center of the water stream as it passes through the nozzle, keeping it away from the nozzle walls. Even so, after three shots, the nozzle still has to be replaced.
“While it’s running, it will cut
anything: lumber like it was butter, steel I-beams as if you were
holding a torch, ceramic armor - doesn’t matter. Only two downsides: it
only goes for about two minutes, and it’s got about thirty pounds of
reaction force - that’s why it’s got those big handles. Okay, three
downsides, it’s heavy as fuck. Well, maybe four, cuz it takes like five
minutes to reload the thing.”
“You’re so smart. That is bloody amazing. Can we fuck now? I scored some weed...”
This is a real thing. It is possible to build this. It is fantastically dangerous.
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