IIRC it serves the same purpose in smokeless gun powder. I guess that is part of the reason black powder goes BOOM!, and smokeless goes FFFFFT! when you throw a match on a little pile of it. Hey Deb, do they use smokeless gunpowder in rockets?
Getting further off topic - have you ever read about the experiments done at, I think, General Dynamics back in the 60s where they launched vehicles with a stream of high explosive charges dropped out the bottom, the shockwaves of which pushed on the dish shaped bottom of the vehicle to lift it? It was a small scale experiment to test Freeman Dyson's proposal of doing the same with a larger vehicle, using small nuclear bombs. They were doing these launches right across the water from some pretty fancy houses in LA. Ah, for the good old days when you could test high explosives and experimental aircraft right in your own neighborhood...
