From: nuny@bid.nes   
      
   On Sunday, June 18, 2017 at 2:35:22 AM UTC-7, Mr Anderson wrote:   
   > Ok, so, I was thinking about ammunition for my in-universe guns, and I came   
   > up with cased telescopic ammunition in 6.5 mm caliber, something in between   
   > currently used 5.56 mm NATO and 7.62 mm NATO. Such caliber is also considered   
   > for future US Army guns.    
   > But then, I started thinking what would be the best type of bullet to shoot   
   > here? Assuming the potential enemies often wear body armor better than today   
   > ones, it could be good to have something like APDS in rifle variant. On the   
   > other hand, the rod penetrator could just go straight through armor and body,   
   > and to kill your target fast you have to hit some important organs. The   
   > expanding bullet won't work, because it wouldn't penetrate much armor. I   
   > started thinking here about explosive bullets (something like HEAP or APHE,   
   > I don't remember which one), but I am not sure how much damage could they   
   > make, with most of the space in bullet taken by penetrator.   
   > Well, the requirement is for a 6.5 mm bullet that goes through body armor,   
   > and kills target instantly if hits in torso.   
      
     Hmmm. Instant knockdown is what really matters, not instant kill, as long as   
   the enemy stays knocked down. Of course typical movie bullshit about a round   
   that can knock down a target without also knocking down the shooter is...   
   unphysical, but an    
   explosive that knocks a target down with a blast upon contacting the armor   
   would work the same without knocking the shooter down too. It wouldn't need to   
   penetrate the armor to do the job if the round carried enough explosive to   
   knock down and    
   incapacitate an armored target. I'm thinking something along the lines of the   
   rounds the space marines used in _Aliens_, only a bit more realistic. They'd   
   need to be rather complex by today's standards with onboard sensors and some   
   sort of safing    
   mechanism that prevents them from detonating in the magazine or while being   
   fired.   
      
     Barring that, the type of armor you have to defeat is key to designing   
   rounds to defeat it. You have hard armor like modern DU plate tank armor, but   
   more and more designers are incorporating standoff materials that rob incoming   
   rounds of much of their    
   momentum before they reach the actual hull.   
      
     One of the space battleship threads pointed out the advantages of spaced   
   aluminum plate-kevlar-sandwich "armor" supposedly already deployed on some   
   Earth-orbiting satellites against micrometeors.   
      
     Explosive penetrators are possible if the penetrator itself is the explosive   
   (now we need a high explosive compound with the hardness of tungsten!), but   
   again, getting it to be stable while in the shooter's magazine, being fired,   
   and initially    
   impacting the target will be tricky to say the least, and then there's getting   
   it to explode just after defeating the armor.   
      
     I'm halfway through my first cup of coffee. Maybe more after a couple of   
   cups.   
      
      
     Mark L. Fergerson   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)