Dtyjlui

No no no no no no no no no. Bad idea.

Chlorine trifluoride is one of the most horrifying substances on Earth. Sure, it can kill people and destroy equipment. But it can also kill the people trying to use it as a weapon. It's difficult to contain and nearly impossible to fight if it starts a fire, and produces extremely toxic byproducts when it reacts with other things. The smallest error in handling it could quite easily kill everyone nearby.

Now, sure, you can handle chlorine trifluoride safely . . . but in a lab, where you have plenty of time to check and double-check and triple-check that things are being done right. You can afford to go slowly. The same isn't true in a war zone, where speed is of the essence. You can either handle the thing safely and get blown up when you can't use it in time, or you can rush to use it and get set on fire when it spills.

Let's look at some of the worst-case scenarios for using this thing in space:

• There's a small leak in a storage unit, and chlorine trifluoride reaches a nearby surface, immediately starting a toxic reaction that will kill many people on the ship because they're trapped in space and have nowhere to hide.


• The fluoride coating on the storage chamber or in the weapon being used to launch it develops an imperfection, and the substance chews through and destroys the equipment.


• The spaceship gets hit by something, causing a breach that releases chlorine trifluoride and unleashes hell. Even a small piece of space debris could cause problems if it hits the weapon in the right place. Also, there are people around you trying to make your spaceship explodes. Even an indirect hit in the right spot could be . . . bad.

The Nazis tried to see if it could be weaponized in the years leading to World War II. They did produce it in non-negligible amounts, but it became clear that using it as a weapon would be a terrible idea in much the same way that mustard gas in World War I was a bad idea: It can turn on the soldiers attempting to deploy it.

The thing is not simply worth the risk.

Chlorine Trifluoride as a Space Weapon?

Not really. Indirectly useful? Yes, for disinformation.

• Convince the enemy that you've found a way to effectively weaponise it. Contrive for them to "find" semi-destroyed plans for a weapon prototype in a way that they can't help but believe is real. (A courier ship on a desperate run carrying "plans" fights a desperate battle to protect them, not surrendering, finaly self destructing in a desperate sacrifice yada, yada etc. only a scrap of plan/data left)




• On making them fall for it, they will gather their top chemists, materials scientists, top engineers and technicians in on place with what is the most uncontrollable, uncontainable, volatile, corrosive, poisonous substance a deranged chemist ever came up with.

Watch for the fireworks. Rejoice, in your enemy's gullibility and that you just cut the head off their science division barely getting your own hands dusty.

Your question can be generalized as "oxidizer weapon". Oxygen or ozone shells would do same thing, although not as intense. You write that

it cannot be put out by venting atmos

but actually it could. What you're trying to do is to create CIF3 atmosphere to burn enemies, but venting it to space would vent it like any other atmosphere. If you could manage to inject an airtight enemy with it, it would work, but otherwise all you get is some minor etching in the split-second before space vacuum "sucks" all your CIF3.

As others have pointed out, there are some problems with this idea.
One that I want to point out is that for this weapon to be effective you must first hit an enemy with the shell.

This will be accomplished by mounting your copper vessel in a magnetically accelerated slug or self-propelled missile. Connecting with the enemy ship is the hardest part. Engagements are likely to take place at pretty extreme ranges, and ships will probably have decent avoidance maneuvers.

Once you hit the enemy, the shell must be strong enough to penetrate the hull and deliver the payload. When you compare the chemical energy stored in your ClFl3 to the kinetic energy required to accomplish the above, we don't really add much.

Yes, a ClFL3 fire in a critical area would be devastating on a ship. But so would the exact same impact from a traditional chemical munition, or even just an inert kinetic impactor.

If your shell is too weak to get through the hull, it would splash against the armor, react with a small amount of the hull material, be explosively ejected by its own reactive byproducts, and disperse into the vacuum of space with minor damage done.

It doesn't look much better if your shell breaches the hull in a shallow manner either. The hull breach will cause explosive decompression, venting the atmosphere AND your ClFl3 before it can react with much.

Well made ships will have self sealing compartments to deal with hull breaches, so you might do some damage to the area directly adjacent to the impact site.

The shell would have to detonate in the middle of the ship for maximum effect.

A design to accomplish this could have an armor penetrating exterior, then detonate and scatter a bunch of smaller sealed copper spheres like a shotgun blast that would ideally breach the inner walls and then combust.

Overall, there is little to gain from conventional munitions with this approach.

ClF3 is surely a very destructive thing. Storing it aboard your spaceship is too risky, sure, as other answers have noted.

The space, however, is made of space, lots of it :) So typically, there will be quite a bunch of space between you and your enemy, be it spaceship combat or orbital bombardment. If some ClF3 happens to destroy your enemy, most likely it won't affect you at the same time, since it's all far away, and there's not enough of it to cover the distance. You just have to stay safe from it before and while you apply it.

So the obvious solution is to drop a machine producing ClF3 upon your enemy. Even the nukes do their job via a nuclear reaction, but that reaction isn't run at our military bases, ships or planes; a projectile starting that reaction when it arrives is used as a weapon instead.

Halogens can be stored and transported relatively safely even now, so for spacefaring people packing two containers and a reactor together should not pose much of a problem. Of course, the enemy can try to destroy the bomb before the reaction has even started, just like missile defense this days tries to stop ICBMs. And countermeasures similar to those of ICBMs can be built into ClF3 factory-bomb (decoys, antiradar measures, etc.)

The real question is whether it's all worth using. What ClF3 can do to an enemy spaceship that a good old atomic bomb can't do? Surely the nuclear reaction has more energy than any sort of oxidizing, no matter how intense or quick. So it apriori will do more damage.

But things get even worse for our nasty chemical, if one thinks more. Space requires a lot of energy, so if it's at larger scale than us earthlings going around the Solar system, a spaceship has access to some energy source probably more powerful than nuclear or thermonuclear. What chance has any oxidizer to compete with the annihilation power scale?

So space warfare will resort to ClF3 only on some specific circumstances:

• Nuclear and more powerful stuff is effectively countered by the enemy. Shields, atomic suppression, or anything else in the same vein.


• Or it's just banned by acting rules of engagement.


• Or it's used intentionally as a nasty disgusting weapon that people normally don't use to shock the enemy.


• Or the nuclear materials are unavailable or prohibitively expensive for some reason, so chemical weapons become a necessity, and the strongest oxidizer all can come into play.

The only thing even less practical is to whip up a batch of FOOF and attempt to hit your enemy with it before your own ship is consumed. Maybe a kamikaze run?

Seriously, with 1960 era technology scientists were contemplating compact nuclear devices which would project star hot plasma at a small fraction of the speed of light (Casaba Howitzer). We now know how to make electromagnetic rail guns, reliable laser weapons, "Third generation" nuclear weapons (imagine a HEAT warhead designed to crack open a mountain), non-nuclear EMP devices...

The greatest danger I can think of for my ships crew is they will be distracted by their hysterical laughter once they realize what you shot at them. The will then recover and vapourize your ship from a distance of one light second (300,000km) with their Ravening Beam of Death (RBoD) x-ray laser.

This would make for a fantastic story...

As I sit here pondering the issue, I wonder about, "what if you have two or three chemicals that, when mixed, produce ClF3? Put those in a warhead" and "what would happen if you used this stuff in a mine field, assuming some unobtainium even it couldn't react with?"

HDE 226868 is absolutely correct, it would be the height of insanity to use this stuff in space combat — but that doesn't mean it wouldn't make one whale of a good story.

• Imagine flying through space and inconveniently running through a cloud of this stuff. Imagine doing that from some ancient battle in a "million-to-one chances happen all the time" Star-Trek-ish sort of way. The stuff would rip the hull off your ship.




• Imagine a missile that happened to impact with a ship using water as its primary radiation shielding. Flash of fireworks, ship shell floating off into space, crew subjected to the horrors of radiation.




• Imagine the innumerable failsafes, the unending training, octuple-redundant computer monitoring, and still some idiot (usually the new guy) slips on his own spit and happens to knock off the adamantium valve in one of those "Dang! I dropped the wrench and blew up the missile!" moments.

Granted, your story had better be a horror story, and there are obviously great reasons in reality to never ever ever touch this stuff under any conditions lest the Olympian gods return and invest you with some never-to-be-completed task...

But the stuff would make for a great story. Really, how often have we heard the "but mutagenic weapons have been banned by all civilized species!" trope? This stuff was designed from the foundation of the universe to fulfill that trope!