Toroid
Founding Member
Does a projectile traveling that fast break the sound barrier?I think a rock launched from one of those things would suffice. But what the hell, in for an antipenny in for an antipound.
This is a version of what an Abrams tank does. It fires a 120mm projectile in a sabot that peels away from a depleted uranium penetrator rod. 20 pounds of inert hurt traveling in excess of 5K fps.
The Pentagon’s New Super Weapon Is Basically A Weaponized Meteor Strike
The Pentagon’s New Super Weapon Is Basically A Weaponized Meteor Strike
In 2013, the U.S. Air Force 846th Test Squadron and civilian researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory successfully test-fired a kinetic energy projectile, a tungsten-rich shell moving at 3,500 feet-per-second — more than three times faster than the speed of sound — on a specialized track at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. More recently, the Pentagon has tested the Navy electromagnetic rail gun’s hypervelocity projectiles with the help of conventional U.S. Army howitzers; the Navy hopes the completed cannon will be able to launch shells at up to 4,500 mph, six times the speed of sound.
Explosives may be dazzling in their destructiveness, but there’s an elegant, almost Newtonian lethality to the kinetic energy projectile, explains Matt Weingart, a weapons program development manager at Lawrence Livermore.
“The classic way of delivering hurt against a target has been to pack a lot of chemical explosive into a container of some kind, a barrel or a cannonball or steel bomb,” Weingart told Task & Purpose in a phone interview. “The violence comes from the chemical explosive inside that bomb sending off a blast wave, followed by the fragments of the bomb case. But the difference with kinetic energy projectiles is that the warhead arrives at the target moving very, very fast — the energy is there to propel those fragments without the use of a chemical explosive to accelerate them. The more mass, the more violence.”