▲ | gorgoiler 12 hours ago | |
As I understand it, conventional explosives derive their destructive force from using chemical energy to vaporize material so quickly that it explodes forming a destructive shockwave. With a kinetic energy impacted like the MOP bunker buster, does the material vaporize ahead of the munitions? Is the destructive shockwave the munition casing itself, or perhaps the vaporized breccia being pushed in front of it? In some ways I imagine it like a nail being driven into the ground but my gut feeling is that, at such high impact energies, something more complicated is going on. For example, with small calibre ballistics you can have many kinds of terminal action: from square edged paper cutting rounds used to make clean holes in targets, to subsonic rounds transferring energy into a target, all the way up to supersonic rounds which drive a shock cone through a “soft” target to cause trauma. |