Things I Won't Work With: Dioxygen Difluoride (2010)

I think there's some stuff in a book called Ignition about experiments using Fluorine as an oxidizer in rocket engines to get a little better specific impulse than oxygen. Only problem is that the exhaust is hydrofluoric acid at thousands of degrees. Yipe.

Ignition has that lovely paragraph about some fluorine based fuel leaking out of the truck that was transporting it* and going through the road surface and then through the half a meter of concrete and stone under the asphalt, alien style.

* the only way to move that fuel was in a refrigerated cistern... at a temp so low that the steel it was made of became brittle and cracked.

I think it's quoted in one of Derek Lowe's articles about fluorine compounds too.

Obligatory dowmload link: https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd...

From memory, that book went in at least four different directions with fluorine compounds. Parts are about increasing specific impulse; parts are about increasing density impulse (fluorine's very dense); parts are about formulating oxidizers hypergolic with kerosene or with hydrogen; parts are about formulating oxidizers for deep space probes, with a melting/boiling point range matched to that thermal environment.

O3F2 is the one that if you add it to liquid oxygen, it makes hydrogen/oxygen combustion hypergolic.

Direct link: (.pdf) https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd...

> O3F2 is the one that if you add it to liquid oxygen, it makes hydrogen/oxygen combustion hypergolic.

O3F2 sounds like it'd be hypergolic with engineers. Nope.

> O3F2 sounds like it'd be hypergolic with engineers. Nope.

Engineers. Asbestos. Sand.

Can confirm 'Nope'.

> a book called Ignition

that book is really good and has some interesting hidden treasures, like a couple of sentences about adding silicon oil to the fuel mixture to create a self-ablating film on the combustion chamber. I think some amateur bi-prop engine guys use that in their fuel setups. It's funny how the book ends after all that research and exotic chemicals with JP-1 and liquid O2 are still pretty much the best combination.

Its probably hypergolic even with Nope. ;-)

There's also adding a bit of Flourine to one of the Fuming Nitric Acids to make it easier to handle, because of the flouridation of the surface of the tanks.

And the bit about using dimethyl mercury as a monopropellant.

Retcon: the Xenomorphs were a form of life based around fluorine chemistry, which provides a physically plausible mechanism for how their blood eats through anything.

Of course that breaks the idea of them incubating in humans, since their biochemistry would react explosively with ours, but that never made sense anyway.

Some sort of out-of-this-world placenta there.