I don't know much about explosives, but I know thermite isn't particularly strong. Still, I couldn't help but laugh when they used thermite to try to thaw out the ship. Would this not damage the components of whatever they were hoping to study? This just struck me as illogical within the context of the situation.
"I'm gonna need a hacksaw"
Yes, which was why the ship blew up when they used it. Kind of the point of the movie. Carrington said right after that he "should have thought". Not so much illogical as just not well thought out.
shareYes but didn't he also get "late" orders to use the thermite as well. If so, then even his superiors weren't thinking either.
shareWell, Crew Chief Bob said using thermite to melt exceptionally thick pack ice was standard procedure. I think the only ill-thought-out part was not realizing sooner that there might be some kind of fuel leakage resulting from the crash. Which, in my permanent opinion, was/is the only logical explanation for the thermite blowing up the spaceship, at all!
shareThermite isn't a "strong explosive", no. But a thermite reaction does produce a tremendous amount of heat - more than enough to melt iron. It would be a good material to use to melt a large amount of ice.
Of course the problem would be producing enough heat to melt a large volume of ice, without producing so much heat that it would damage the UFO. I always thought they went about using it in a very slipshod manner - basically just chucked a bunch of the stuff down around the fin and set it off. They really should have waited until they could dig it out, even if that meant coming back weeks later with reinforcements. They were in no hurry, after all.
Yes, the same explosive that brought down the twin towers and WTC7 on 9/11.
shareIn Campbell's original story -- "Who Goes There?" -- thermite was used to loosen the ice around a hatch that was slightly open and iced in that position for a million years or so. The fuselage of the ship -- which wasn't a saucer, but more like a submarine without the external tower or diving planes -- was an alloy comprised of about 95% magnesium which, when ignited, flares up and burns particularly hot. They didn't recognize it was magnesium beforehand. In any case, there are different kinds of thermite that burn at different intensities. That particular sequence in the move has a number of awkward elements to it: 1) If they melted the ice, it would be underwater; 2) Even if it wasn't, what would they do with it, with a storm blowing in? 3) Bob puts the thermite right next to the protruding airfoil, which is like trying to cook your food by throwing it into the fire; 4) They quickly chop the creature out of the ice with axes in the face of a coming storm, but that would be a much bigger job than they make it appear -- they have to chop down deep enough to get under it while making sure the furrows they cut are wide enough for themselves, and then they have to do the chopping under it to get the block free. In Campbell's story, they're at the site for almost two weeks. I love the movie, though, flaws and all.
You can read it for free at a site called "Outpost 31", which is set up for fans of John Carpenter's version of "The Thing".