Faltaire’s Experiment!

‘See, sire!' says Faltaire, gesticulating at a nearby cannon. 'I have been cogitating on the best medium to dissolve gunpowder into and have settled upon this very white, very fine sand, sourced from the finest of Nabstria’s beaches.  I have mixed an entire bag of sand with just one grain of gunpowder – if my calculations are correct, then we may have invented the most powerful explosive in the world!’

'Interesting,' muses Falco. 'And also rather counter-intuitive, if I may add.'

The gun team go through their evolutions again but this time with Monsieur Faltaire’s ‘homeopathic’ gunpowder.  He does, however, allow them to use the standard Nabstrian gunpowder in the touch hole…

‘Fire!’ There is a slight flash as the gunpowder in the touch-hole goes off and then…..nothing happens…

‘Ahem, excuse me, sir, but, with respect, sir, it doesn’t seem to have bloody worked, sir’. The gunnery sergeant says rather rudely to Faltaire.  ‘It’ll take ages to clear the barrel of that bloody sand’, the sergeant mutters under his breath to no one in particular…

After a rather long and rather awkward silence, Faltaire begins to muse once again..
‘Hmmm…perhaps sand is not the right diluting medium for homeopathic gunpowder… or perhaps the ‘dilution’ is insufficient … perhaps a dilution of one part in a million might prove more efficacious’…. Faltaire's voice once again tails off into a reverie of natural philosophy.
‘Well?  Faltaire?  Is that the end of your experiment?’  enquires Von Rumpfler rather roughly.
‘Ah!  Oh!  Well, my dear general, no, not exactly.  With the Burggrave’s permission, I should rather like to test a new siege mortar of my own design.  Not being entirely sure that I could explore the new science of homeopathy successfully this morning, I decided to design a mortar which would rely on proven concepts.  With your permission, sire?’
‘Yes, yes, of course, Faltaire’, says the Burggrave with a note of irritation in his voice …