Armor Piercing Ammo - Military People - L.E.O.'s

[Sharpshooter]

Boofus.....
I stand corrected, thanks....

 

[richyoung]

Maybe I have this wrong, but I understood Level IV to only be available in plate form...specifically 0.5 inch special steel alloy, or 0.75" "Chicken Plate" ceramic. Does one add these plates to the vest, or is this just a rating for vehicle and building armor?

 

[Sharpshooter]

it's "Hard body armor" you wear it by it's self. Heavy as hell too. You have a front & rear plate. The one I used was 1.5" thick.

 

[p35]

Someone used to make civilian caliber explosive bullets- Hinckley used them (in .22LR) to shoot Reagan and those other people back in 1981. IIRC the bullet that hit Reagan was a riccochet off his limo, and so had already exploded. THe one that hit Jim Brady apparently exploded when it hit his skull, which is why he suffered brain damage but survived. A solid probably would have killed him.

Anyway, I've never seen them for sale anywhere and doubt they're still being made. Even when they were no one had much good to say about them.

 

[Joejojoba111]

Ja, III is hard armor for rifle threats, IV is hard armour for defeating AP threats. The levels are simply the USA NIJ ones, Europeans use a different standard. Nevertheless level IV doesn't have to be a plate, it can be any form as long as it meets the requisites laid out in the lates (2004) nij standards. One new vest has hundreds of little titanium-ceramic coins all over it, dragonscale or something.

Werewolf, yea maybe ittybitty is bad word, but when you see the silver-dollar hole in an M1A1 hit by a Maverick missile it just seems small!

Rich, yea Uranium combusts when in the presence of oxygen, which is a bonus, and the shearing is nice. However Europeans aren't lazy and they have new tungsten penetrators that shear in a similar manner. Before the tungsten rod would sort of mushroom at the tip. Anyway I think that all penetrators, not just DU ones, 'bite' into sloped armor. It has nothing to do with shear, that would counter the effect, what happens is that the rods aren't actually pointy, that's just a windcap on them. They're blunt at the front, so the windcap falls away and this blunt rod can dig into very sloped armor.

 

[Cosmoline]

Someone used to make civilian caliber explosive bullets- Hinckley used them (in .22LR) to shoot Reagan and those other people back in 1981. IIRC the bullet that hit Reagan was a riccochet off his limo, and so had already exploded. THe one that hit Jim Brady apparently exploded when it hit his skull, which is why he suffered brain damage but survived. A solid probably would have killed him.

I have heard that Hinckley used the "devestator" rounds, but I've never seen that confirmed. In any case the one in Brady's head didn't blow up but was pulled out intact, and the one that bounced off the car acted just like any other .22. .22's are notorious for bouncing around inside the body. And when fired out of a small revolver there's every reason to expect only a shallow penetration into a person's skull.

In short, the "exploding" .22's were a novelty item with no practical application. The only practical exploding rounds I've seen this side of a 20mm cannon were on very old elephant gun slugs. The exploding tip on those was designed as a primitive expansion device to force the massive slug open as it impacted. Obviously with smokeless powder and modern materials we don't need anything like that today.

 

[Waitone]

I hope Teddy Kennedy isn't lurking. You've all just demonstrated utter stoopidity at banning "some" armor piercing, cop killing ammo.

 

[Delmar]

Waitone-I wouldn't be too concerned about Teddy the Swimmer and the dreaded "copkiller" ammo. He flat wants to ban everything!

 

[benEzra]

plus there is a slight fissile nuclear yield that contaminates the equipment and sickens any crew that survive the attack.

There is NO fissile yield from a depleted uranium projectile as a result of impact with armor (or anything else). None.

U-238 undergoes EXTREMELY slow alpha decay (not fission), so slowly that it would take several billion years for even half of a given sample to decay into something other than uranium.

Fission in uranium-238 can occur only when the material is bombarded with fast neutrons from some other source (such as the detonation of a thermonuclear secondary). Merely smacking some armor at a few thousand feet per second won't even begin to shake up an atomic nucleus.

In a given sample of uranium, you will have a very small sample of the U-235 isotope that undergoes a TINY amount of spontaneous fission--barely enough to detect with very sensitive instruments. But fission in any very-subcritical mass of uranium is completely and totally negligible.

Like most other heavy metals, uranium IS toxic (so is tungsten), and breathing uranium vapor isn't good for you. But it has nothing to do with nuclear yield, and it would be toxic even if not a low-level alpha emitter.

 

[Cosmoline]

I've always been interested in the AP abilities of the ultra-high SD safari rounds. The 170 grain 7mm solids, for example. But I suspect nobody will do the test for fear of the individual with the puffy red face mentioned above.