Ah, the Stink Bomb. That little blue ubiquitous grenade that you probably pass over a dozen times in every round in favor of more powerful throwable weapons. In Fortnite, it seems almost whimsical: akin to the stink bombs that you can buy at magic shops and dime stores around the world that are merely little drops of nasty-smelling sulfurous liquid in a thin glass container.
However, a quick look at real-world stink bombs makes you realize that it is far more insidious than that. So insidious, in fact, that there have been treaties banning its use going as far back as Article 23 of the Hague Convention of 1899.
If the Stink Bomb existed in the real world, there would only be one name for it: a chemical weapon, and a nasty one at that.
Throwing the Stink Bomb in Fortnite does not cause any physical damage to structures, weapons, or vehicles, therefore it doesn’t affect the player’s shield (and isn’t blocked by it, either). Instead, when the Stink Bomb hits its target, it creates a ten-meter-diameter sphere of greenish gas that causes ten points of damage per second. Thankfully (if you are the target of the Stink Bomb), there is only enough gas in a single Stink Bomb to last for nine seconds, so it won’t kill you if you’re at full health. Regardless: we are talking about a gas bomb that can kill a person in ten seconds.
What do we call a gas that can kill you in ten seconds? Does such a thing even exist?
Any weaponized form of gas that can cause fatality in humans is certainly some kind of chemical weapon, and, as such, one of the most dangerous devices humanity has ever created. If you know your history (or even your current events), you know that the use of weapons like this is completely illegal in virtually every country on the planet, as well as under any conventions of war or international treaties.
You might be thinking: wait, out of all the weapons in Fortnite, this is the one that is actually the worst in real life? It barely even does any damage!
While it may be true that the Stink Bomb is not the deadliest weapon in Fortnite, that’s because it only comes in such small quantities. You can imagine what would happen if, for example, you could create an extraordinarily large Stink Bomb that was capable of, say, covering all of Neo Tilted (or the entire island) in a cloud of green gas for multiple minutes. It would be even more deadly than the Storm (which takes a whole lot longer than ten seconds to kill you). At this scale, there is another word for the stink bomb: weapon of mass destruction. If you made a stink bomb in real life, and made it large enough to cover a whole city, you would have a weapon as deadly as anything ever created by humankind, capable of killing millions of people in less than a minute.
So if the Fortnite Stink Bomb is in fact a chemical weapon, what kind is it?
Actual chemical weapons are generally called chemical agents, and there are quite a few different types of them out there. To figure out exactly which chemical agent is in a Fortnite Stink Bomb (or at least the one with the most similar properties), we need to start by listing everything we know about the Stink Bomb, and then seeing if any of the known chemical agents meet that description.
1. The chemical agent in the Fortnite Stink Bomb is a gas or a vapor of some kind.
This fact, while helpful, only narrows down our search a little bit. Most of the common chemical agents used in chemical weapons can be made into a vapor or gas, although not all of them are most effective in this state. For example, VX, one of the deadliest chemical weapons on Earth, kills its victims mostly by dropping into a liquid and getting on people’s skin. That said, considering that almost any chemical agent (or at least any of the broad categories of chemical agents) can be made into a gas more or less like the kind that comes out of the Fortnite Stink Bomb, we can’t really narrow anything down just yet.
2: The Fortnite Stink Bomb is stinky.
Okay, I don’t really know what the Fortnite Stink Bomb actually smells like because Fortnite is, you know, a video game, and you can’t smell video games (at least, not yet). Nonetheless, I think it is safe to assume that the Stink Bomb is not ironically named, and is actually at least a little bit smelly.
So do all chemical agents smell bad? Do any chemical agents smell good? Can we narrow down our search at all with this information?
These are actually rather difficult questions to answer. First of all, whether something smells good or bad is fundamentally a qualitative judgment and a matter of personal opinion. Something that smells perfectly fine to me might smell quite disagreeable to you, and vice versa. Also, seeing as how forming a subjective opinion requires actually experiencing the smell of something, and nobody wants to go around smelling chemical agents and deciding if they like their odor or not, there really isn’t a lot of information out there about how people have judged these particular odors in the past. So we’ll have to set aside the question of which chemical agents smell “good” and which ones smell “bad.” That said, we can figure out which chemical agents are considered odorless, and which ones are known to have a distinct odor. This information, being very useful in the detection of such agents, is widely known and readily available. Thus, we can eliminate any of the chemical agents that are actually odorless. After all, something that is odorless would probably not inspire the name “Stink Bomb,” would it?
So, which chemical agents can we eliminate based on whether they have an odor? Quite a few, actually. There’s arsine, VX, and lewisite, for starters. Sarin is considered odorless in its pure form, but it is rarely found in its pure form, so that one is kind of a wash. In the end, while we are able to eliminate about 30 percent of known chemical agents, we can’t eliminate any one entire category yet, so let’s just keep going and see what we come up with.
3. The gas inside the Fortnite Stink Bomb is fatal in ten seconds.
Here is where we can really start to narrow it down a bit. While many of the remaining chemical agents are fatal in high enough concentrations (and with long enough exposure), only a few of them can kill someone in under a minute, with most of them taking anywhere from an hour to multiple days to cause fatality.
Now we can eliminate a few of the broad categories of chemical agents. There are basically four categories: blistering agents (like lewisite and mustard gas), nerve agents (like sarin, soman, and VX), blood agents (like cyanogen chloride and hydrogen cyanide), and choking agents (like phosgene, diphosgene, and chlorine).
As it turns out, pretty much all of these agents work very much as their names suggest:
So what are we left with? After looking at each of the four major categories of chemical agents, we can rule out the blistering agents and limit our search to nerve agents, blood agents, and any choking agents that work particularly quickly.
4. Stink Bombs create a greenish, translucent gas.
Here is where I think we can finally figure out which chemical agent is our winner. Now that we have narrowed our search down to nerve agents, blood agents, and a few choking agents, we just need to see which (if any) of these can be made into a greenish, translucent gas.
Right away we can eliminate all of the major blood agents. Phosgene, arsine, cyanogen, and all of the rest of the blood agents are all colorless in their gaseous forms, and thus not the right pick for the Fortnite Stink Bomb.
Nerve agents, it turns out, are also pretty much all colorless, and most of them are actually odorless as well. In any case, out of all of the few nerve agents that are spreadable in a gas and can be lethal in under a minute, none of them are green and/or stinky.
This brings us the choking agents, and a quick review of the color and order of each of these shows that only one is a real contender for the Fortnite Stink Bomb: good old-fashioned chlorine. That’s right, the same chemical that you use to get the skid marks out of your shorts, in its gaseous form, is a greenish-yellow, very unpleasant-smelling gas that, in high enough doses, can be fatal very quickly.
All that said, is it really possible to make a stink bomb that is as fatal as the ones in Fortnite? Probably not. Even with chlorine gas, you would need to get the concentrations in the air to exceed at least 1,000 parts per million (though you would probably need to be closer to 10,000 parts per million) to achieve death in under a few minutes. Even if you were to inject the chlorine gas directly into somebody’s lungs, it is doubtful that they would die in ten seconds. More importantly, making any kind of grenade-type device out of chlorine gas that could create concentrations of gas outdoors, in the open air, would probably be impossible.