
thumb|A stick of cordite from World War II thumb|A sectioned British 18-pounder field gun shrapnel round, World War I, with bound string to simulate the appearance of the original cordite propellant thumb|Close-up of cordite filaments in a .303 British rifle cartridge (manufactured in 1964) thumb|Burning a strand of cordite from a .303 British round
thumb|A stick of cordite from World War II thumb|A sectioned British 18-pounder field gun shrapnel round, World War I, with bound string to simulate the appearance of the original cordite propellant thumb|Close-up of cordite filaments in a .303 British rifle cartridge (manufactured in 1964) thumb|Burning a strand of cordite from a .303 British round
Cordite is a family of smokeless propellants developed and produced in Britain since 1889 to replace black powder as a military firearm propellant. Cordite is made by combining two chemical high explosives: nitrocellulose and nitroglycerine in certain ways, and is therefore a chemical high explosive moderated with another chemical high explosive. They are designed, in normal use, to produce a subsonic deflagration wave rather than the supersonic detonation wave produced by brisants, or high explosives. The hot gases produced by burning gunpowder or cordite generate sufficient pressure to propel a bullet or shell to its target, but not so quickly as to routinely destroy the barrel of the gun.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).