The reason they couldn't figure out how many rebels there were wasn't that they had too little information. It was that too much information was coming in, making it impossible to tell what was true and what wasn't.
When Franz's troops reached the outskirts of Venice, a sense of foreboding settled over him. The gates of the vast city stood firmly shut, yet there wasn't a single soldier on the walls.
Colonel Monta sent someone to call at the gates, but after several attempts, no one answered.
"Blow the gates open!"
Franz's voice was resolute.
"But, Your Highness, if we blow up the gates, how will we defend the city?"
Colonel Monta was in a quandary. They had to take Venice, but they also had to hold it against an unknown number of rebels.
Venice's gates were massive and reinforced with steel, but Colonel Monta did have a way to break them open.
Franz had developed nitroglycerin early on, so the Weapon Development Bureau had also come up with weapons to use it. Their attempts to stabilize it, however, hadn't been very successful.
These early detonators were immensely powerful, but extremely dangerous. Anyone carrying them had to stay well away from the rest of the troops.
The nitroglycerin detonators were highly unstable, and since they were intended for use as weapons, they were powerful enough to wipe out an entire transport unit.
They were even more powerful than the TNT familiar to later generations. When one kilogram of nitroglycerin exploded, it produced 715 liters of gas, releasing heat in the process.
Depending on the researcher's data, that heat amounted to 6.082×10³–6.178 kJ (when water was in a gaseous state). The explosion's temperature could reach about 3,980°C, with a pressure of roughly 9000×105 Pa.
That was more than thirty times the