I’m a little suprised that when Quirrel was having Harry come up with creative improvised weapons, that Harry did not mention the deliberate use of dangerous transfigurations as a chemical weapon.
The trick is to transfigure a (high-strength metal) shell containing an extremely compressed solid or nonvolatile liquid. The stored energy is in the elastic force.
Specifically, I imagine the following:
Build a compressing machine (can be transfigured, in which case you get to use improbably high tech components.)
Assemble the grenades using natural mundane components.
Pressurize.
Transfigure grenade, but not the machine, into a tiny maintainable form.
Store in pouch or in armored carrier in case of maintain failure.
Finite Incantatem to detonate.
If you can transfigure as fast as Quirrel, you can just transfigure mundane feedstock into this sort of thing pre-charged.
Some pretty simple but custom charms would make this even better.
However, if you can partial-transfigure as fast as Quirrel (and cast the Bubble-head charm, and almost instantaneously cast wandless wordless Finite), you can probably do much better (and more efficiently) with a multilayer system of magical cybernetics (combined with whatever buffs, self-spells, potions, etc already exist), flash-transfigured Iron Man suit parts, and (for the smallest transfiguration-size per output) flash-transfigured antimatter.
I can actually imagine Harry duct-taping a small bottle of water to his wand so that he can always have a ready feedstock for transfiguration.
Hmm, speaking of shrapnel… If one were to be hit by shrapnel from an object that had been Transfigured into a smaller one, would the shrapnel explode troll-style when the Transfiguration is Finite-d? If so, this seems like an useful effect...
Transfigure 100 kg of material into a one microgram antimatter. (Several tons of TNT equivalent, mostly gamma rays.) Detonate in shielded test chamber. Finite. What happens to the charged pions, neutral pions, and gamma rays?
Well, it would produce shrapnel…
I’m a little suprised that when Quirrel was having Harry come up with creative improvised weapons, that Harry did not mention the deliberate use of dangerous transfigurations as a chemical weapon.
The trick is to transfigure a (high-strength metal) shell containing an extremely compressed solid or nonvolatile liquid. The stored energy is in the elastic force.
Specifically, I imagine the following:
Build a compressing machine (can be transfigured, in which case you get to use improbably high tech components.)
Assemble the grenades using natural mundane components.
Pressurize.
Transfigure grenade, but not the machine, into a tiny maintainable form.
Store in pouch or in armored carrier in case of maintain failure.
Finite Incantatem to detonate.
If you can transfigure as fast as Quirrel, you can just transfigure mundane feedstock into this sort of thing pre-charged.
Some pretty simple but custom charms would make this even better.
However, if you can partial-transfigure as fast as Quirrel (and cast the Bubble-head charm, and almost instantaneously cast wandless wordless Finite), you can probably do much better (and more efficiently) with a multilayer system of magical cybernetics (combined with whatever buffs, self-spells, potions, etc already exist), flash-transfigured Iron Man suit parts, and (for the smallest transfiguration-size per output) flash-transfigured antimatter.
I can actually imagine Harry duct-taping a small bottle of water to his wand so that he can always have a ready feedstock for transfiguration.
Shrapnel enters the body. Now, you don’t always care about transfiguration safety when you’re fighting to kill, but it’s still an issue.
Hmm, speaking of shrapnel… If one were to be hit by shrapnel from an object that had been Transfigured into a smaller one, would the shrapnel explode troll-style when the Transfiguration is Finite-d? If so, this seems like an useful effect...
Thought of it independently.
Tests for Harry to do:
Transfigure 100 kg of material into a one microgram antimatter. (Several tons of TNT equivalent, mostly gamma rays.) Detonate in shielded test chamber. Finite. What happens to the charged pions, neutral pions, and gamma rays?