I recall reading about all those big magnum rifles which could be loaded with a compressed charge of a slow burning powder such as 1831 which was very popular in that era. Then it seems some folks wanted a reduced load so as this was then a surplus powder & available at extremely attractive they just cut back & loaded about a half charge. Most of the time everything went OK but on occasion, one would get a blown up gun. A lot of p[eop;e started hollering Detonation from all the exposure of the charge to the primer flash. Ballistics labs could not reproduce any high pressures at all & some went so far as to say this simply could not occur & had to be from some other cause rather than loading the light charge.
Rifles, however, continued to blow up. Investigation finally proved it was actually a failure of the slow burning powder to properly ignite with the primer force pushing the bullet into the bore & when the powder then caught the bullet itself acted as an obstruction. To the best of my knowledge, it was proven beyond doubt none of these bursts had been due to detonation.
Many feel that a lot of the early burst shotgun barrels when the switch to smokeless came in was from a similar cause. It took a while to realize the primers which were successfully used with black were simply not sufficiently hot to ignite smokeless resulting in an ignition lag. Damascus, of course,
became the ScapeGoat.
So yes under some conditions it is possible to get a "Detonation" with smokeless pro[pellant, but I would have virtually no concern of it happening inside a gun barrel. Plus like I said a detonation would not have just split the chamber, it would have made shrapnel out of it. With a true detonation, there is no such thing as a slow burn or fast burn, the entire charge simply GOES as one. It needs neither a projectile in front nor an overcharge to totally shatter the chamber. This is NOT the condition I am seeing in this gun.
