How to defeat a villain made of living metal? (Chemists needed)

I'm planning on introducing a villain to an original story I'm working on that's made of living steel and is thus very hard to defeat.

What should I do to have the heroes overcome him? I want to have the villain end up being defeated through chemistry, as the fight eventually brings him to a high school chem lab.

Problem is, I'm really not sure if I high school chem lab would have anything that's capable of corroding or otherwise reacting with metal, and I'm not knowledgeable enough to know what could potentially hurt something made out of steel. Does anyone have any ideas?

If he's not made of stainless steel, you could simply rust him to death.

That's an idea I've considered, as one of the main characters uses water magic, but I don't think it would be anything more than a temporary setback.

Aqua regia? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_regia

Hmm, that could work. I did some research, and it said that hydrochloric or sulfuric acid could work also.

It pretty much can't be done without taking a break from reality. Any steel can be made to rust (including stainless steel), but something as massive as a steel humanoid form has such a low surface to content ratio that it will only rust very slowly. There are ways to speed it up a little, like adding moisture and electrolytes (dissolved salts), but that will slow your villains rusty demise from months or even years to mere weeks. Still not much use in a chase.

Because the oxidation of iron is an endothermic reaction, it is theoreticly possible to make the reaction self-sustaining. In other words, it is possibe to set steel on fire. It's not even really hard, provided the steel is very thin. Setting fire to a steel rod with a half inch diameter requires a temperature of around 1500 degrees centigrade. A normal coal fire isn't hot enough for that. You need a very well aired anthracite fire, like you'd find in a blacksmiths workshop. (Novice) blacksmiths sometimes accidentily set fire to the steel the're heating by fanning the flames too enthusiasticly. Convection from the fire is at singed eyebrow stage by then. Setting fire to a steel golem is a suicide mission.

If the monster is just normal steel, freezing it could make it go brittle. It'd still require quite a wack to shatter it though. If it's stainless steel this won't work nearly as well. Another way of making steel more brittle is by carbonating it: cover it in oil or grease, something sticky consisting mainly of carbon hydrates, and set fire to that. It'll have to burn for some time to have a noticable effect though, and a side effect is that the steel just got a lot harder.

Seriously, I'd consider a handwave here.

Acid works, again, in theory. You won't find aqua regia in a random school lab. They might have a small vial of the stuff, for demonstrations by the teacher, but certainly no significant volumes. Mixing it up on the fly takes a lot of time, because the ingredients you need aren't available in the required concentrations in a school lab either. It can be done from scratch, but with the materials available at a school lab and just a couple of people, making enough to have a significant impact on a human-sized opponent would take a few days at least.

You've watched Terminator 2 right? That should give you some ideas.

edited 3rd Aug '11 9:41:18 PM by dRoy

Basically, lob the metal man in lava?

Or seal him in airtight container.

Acid? Lots and lots of really corrosive acid? Or possibly dunking him in liquid nitrogen?

Or hiring a sexy woman to hit on him and dump him so he cold shower himself to death?

edited 3rd Aug '11 11:01:36 PM by dRoy

Most of the acids you find in the average school lab are not anywhere near concentrated enough. If you're lucky, you might find some fuming nitric acid - we had a small amount of that in our high school lab.

Not enough to do more than seriously piss off an adult-sized metal man, though, for the surface area reason mentioned previously - you'd sear the outside of the body but the liquid would run off before it could do a lot of deep damage. Short of pinning it down totally immobile for long enough to deliver the acid slowly and steadily on a vital spot (head? Where does a metal man keep its control centre, anyway?) you're not going to have much luck even with highly concentrated acids.

And if you can pin it down long enough to corrode through to something vital, you probably wouldn't need to use acid - you've already beaten it.

They could possibly make up some thermite and try to use it to set fire to, or at least seriously damage, the living metal.

edited 3rd Aug '11 11:27:13 PM by Wolf1066

You wouldn't find premade aqua regia anywhere because it doesn't store very well.

You could use electrolysis, but that requires a lot of stuff: electricity, an electrolyte, and another metal like copper. Hard to arrange if he doesn't sit still for it.

But why are you worrying about hard science with a living metal dude? The weight and flexibility issues resign the whole thing to a hand-wave from the start.

Anything will break subjected to sufficient force. Anything will melt subjected to sufficient heat. Nobody is exempt from basic physics.

Shooting the man of steel won't bother him much. Three or four people firing full clips into him from assault rifles will probably cause him to visibly stagger and slow from the transfer of kinetic energy. Small autocannons with HE rounds will probably immobilize or knock him over.

Thermite will make him burn/melt. Dump a large pile of it (it's very easy to make, and you can do so in your garage) on him, put a match to one of the magnesium bars you can get at camping stores, and toss it into the pile. At the very least he's going to be badly hurt.

Coating him in jet fuel and lighting him on fire will cause him to burn. Yes, steel does burn; it's simply not self-sustaining. You'd have to make him burn for a long while before you got serious damage, but I doubt he'll enjoy it, and if you're willing to trade space for time you can probably do so repeatedly until he falls over dead or is gone.

Tank guns will probably punch blocks out of him and may cause him to shatter.

Smallish (66mm? There was a LAW in that size.) HEAT rounds will hurt him very badly.

Nuke him and there will be nothing left.

In a lot of ways the term "man of steel" just isn't as impressive as people think it is.

edited 4th Aug '11 5:31:32 AM by Night

Construct F₂O₂, or pretty much any other fluorine compound. To give you an idea of what it does, I learned about it in an article titled "Sand won't save you this time". It is, if anything in RL is, Explodium itself. Cl₂F₃ does something similar, but not quite as vigorously. In both cases, the sand bucket won't save you because they'll simply ignite and burn the sand!

Of course, that's if you want chemistry-based overkill. Throwing him in a sufficiently hot fire will work. Nuclear reactors and particle accelerators are good for that.

edited 4th Aug '11 6:23:37 AM by Yej

Why not superheat him and cool him down directly afterwards?

...I may be showing my lack of chemical knowledge so please don't hurt me if im wrong. I bruise easy.

I think I know how to defeat him.

One of the characters uses fire magic, and another character uses water magic, which in this setting can control any liquid, including hydrocarbons.

Compress the gasoline, then heat it up, and I think you know where this is going.

Of course, this is made more difficult because this is a setting where fossil fuels are somewhat rare in the developed world due to the fact that magic can generate energy from nothing and nearly all cars are electric. Cue the wild goose chase as the heroes go halfway across the state to find a charging station that also sells gas.

edited 4th Aug '11 7:00:38 AM by Zennistrad

Why not just use aqua regia? It's not actually that hard to make, especially if you've got liquid-based magic. The main ingredients are hydrogen, chlorine, oxygen and nitrogen, the last two of which are free, since they're the bulk of the atmosphere.

(Isn't it odd that you can make a superacid out of gases? )

Or, if you want Stuff Blowing Up, pure hydrogen is fun.

edited 4th Aug '11 7:15:22 AM by Yej

I like the idea of a highschool lab fight. With water magic and fire magic and a little hand waving, I think you could so dome thing cool with dry ice (most highscool labs have some for demonstration) and some fire arcs.

Granted, alone most things in a school lab wouldn't be dangerous, but in conjunction, under the right circumstances...

My high-school chesmistry teacher once pointed out that a fire in the science wing of my school would be a guaranteed disaster if they attempted to use, say, water cannons, as there were just enough water reactant substances (tiny quantities of pure sodium, etc.) to create a decent-sized blast... which would, in turn, let loose any number of normally less inflammable chemicals en masse, some extremely dangerous when mixed.

The resulting explosion would likely take out at least 30% of the building.

Make of this what you will.

So basically mix all the chemicals in one cocktail, set off the fire sprinklers, and use that to blow a huge chunk out of the metal-man? That's another way to kill him.

You need more than sprinklers. It would have to be compressed and concentrated, as a fire-hose would be.

Because you need a lot of it to have any impact on a human sized opponent. Aqua regia can dissolve steel, but only a little bit of it. Splashing some onto a steel golem isn't going to eat through the thing, it'll just leave some burnt out drip trails across its chest. And it might be composed of common enough elements, but they don't form into aqua regia just by putting them together. It takes several reactions, all of which require quite a bit of precision, to be carried out in the right order, other wise you might end up with nitrous oxide (which will knock you out), chlorine gas (which will burn the insides of your lungs causing you to suffocate on your own lymbic fluids) and water. This won't stop a steel golem, but it will potentially kill a human protagonist.

Compressing a liquid is, for all intents and purposes, impossible. That's what sets liquids apart from gasses. Even if it were possible, compressing it doesn't make gasoline or any other carbohydrate more combustible. Much the opposite. Also, the trick of engulfing a steel structure in burning, carbon-rich material isn't blowing the steel up, it's getting extra carbon into the crystal structure of the steel, making the thing both harder and more brittle.

If you want to defeat a steel monster with things available in a high school chemistry lab, and have it make any sense from a chemical and mechanical perspective, I'd suggest using a steel monster that wields bladed weapons that are part of its body. Steel cutting tools are either made of carbon steel (which will rust over time, but affords the steelworker the greatest amount of control over the exact shape of the steel) or martensitic stainless steels. Martensitic steels are steels that are heated, then cooled in exactly controlled intervals, causing inclusion of elements such as carbon, chromium, molybdenum and vanadium just like in regular stainless steel, but in a way that leaves the original (cubic) crystal structure of the steel largely intact. This makes martensitic steel considerably softer then regular stainless steel, making it easier to sharpen to a good edge, and less likely to chip if it strikes something hard.

Carbonating the steel by covering it in burning gasoline undoes the martensitic properties of the steel. If you then cool the steel rapidly, you end up with something really, really hard, and quite brittle. Your heros could just make sure the monster hit some hard surfaces, and it would pretty much destroy itself. Still, it would require dousing a moving, man-sized creature in burning gasoline (quite a bit of it I might add), and keeping the monster burning at least for a couple of minutes, then rapidly cooling it (not that hard with a water wizard around, but a CO 2-based fire exinguisher would work wonders as well) and making it hit some hard stuff.

Seriously, engineers, knife makers and steel workers are a pretty small demographic to show your work. Don't let the narrative suffer under the rules of reality, especially as you already have included magic (magic which violates the law of conservation of energy no less). There's nothing wrong with a well placed handwave.

edited 4th Aug '11 1:05:12 PM by JOZeldenrust

And remember that Reality Is Unrealistic can be your best friend.