In Andy Weir's The Martian one of the characters uses a mixture of sugar and liquid oxygen as an IED. Loads of energy in sugar. Glycerin is also quite energy dense. I used to do chemistry demos for high school chem classes and the potassium permanganate and glycerin demo was always a spectacle.
For a lot of propulsion kinds of reactions you can mix a good oxidizer (liquid oxygen, high percentage hydrogen peroxide, fuming nitric acid) with any organic solid. Hotdogs, sugar, fat, or just anything really made mostly of carbon.
Are small, retail model rockets allowed to be launched from large public spaces in the US still? Or do they require a license, realtime transponder, and a bunch of bureaucratic red tape like RC aircraft that is effectively a dead hobby with a Hobson's choice between privacy invasion and cost, over-criminalization, and non-participation.
Oh wow this unlocked an elementary school memory I haven't thought about in awhile. I used to launch rockets with one of my teachers at my school's soccer field. I remember the smell of the engines distinctly.
If under a certain size, the rules are basically "as long as it isn't hazardous" which is vague but more or less requires common sense.
It's also not that hard to comply with RC aircraft regulations.
Plus, drones are everywhere, it's not exactly a dead hobby. Most of the people who were interested in other kinds of RC aircraft are more attracted to the much easier to handle quadcopter types.
This is just "rocket candy" right? My friend made this stuff a whole bunch when we were teens. Once during a summer break from college, we lit up a watermelon sized chunk of the stuff, producing a house sized plume of white smoke and a mild explosion.
It's pretty fun! Maybe don't build missiles with it and attempt to kill your neighbor with it though, seems like the least fun possible use for it.
It's also opportunistic exploitation of supplies which would be likely to pass through an imports blockade, as has been the case in Gaza.
Both sugar and fertiliser are basic-needs goods, with obvious nonmilitary applications. The fact that they can be combined (with other dual-purpose and low-cost materials, such as steel piping) to create ballistic weapons with ranges (and accuracies) of tens of kilometres is useful to Hamas and of course highly problematic for Israel.
What the source I'd linked noted was that though the rockets are individually highly inaccurate, en mass they become effective area denial weapons (effectively aerial mines), and a highly-asymmetric cost advantage over Israel's Iron Dome ballistic missile defence systems. A Qassam rocket costs less than $1,000, whilst a single shot by Iron Dome is on the order of $100,000, for a 100:1 cost advantage to the attacker. Even given Israel's vastly greater economic capacity over Hamas, that stings.
Not quite, it contains a little bit of water and will be fine sitting on a bench in an open beaker. But you should really avoid touching it or having it touch anything, particularly anything with carbon in it.