I’ve noticed that, in recent months, a few Marvel comics have had characters using Adamantium bullets. Adamantium, as you’ll recall, is a (fictional) iron alloy that’s completely indestructible. (Well, maybe if you put some right next to a multimegaton nuke when it went off, you could destroy it.)
Anyway, I’m left wondering…what would the real advantages (and disadvantages) of a completely indestructible bullet be?
To start with, let’s assume that the materials we’re working with has about the same weight/density of normal Steel. It’s just indestructible.
Now, I’m no expert on ballistics…but I’ve been able to come up with a quick list of advantages and disadvantages such a projectile might have.
Disadvantages:
•The bullet couldn’t use the lanes and grooves of a gun barrel normally. If it’s indestructible, it would carve into the metal of the barrel. Jacketing the bullet would probably take care of this problem, though. Or even Sabot-ing it, to be more exotic.
•The bullet wouldn’t deform on impact after hitting it’s target, meaning it couldn’t cause as much injury as a hollow-point bullet, or even a lead bullet.
Advantages:
•Superior armor-piercing abilities. I don’t know how superior they’d be—compared to, say, regular Steel or Depleted Uranium—but I’d guess that they’d be pretty good.
Unless Marvel’s changed things, Adamantium is made by mixing two “resins” (how a metal is made of “resins” is another question) which, when kept above a certain temperature, can be molded. Once it cools below that threshold temperature it hardens almost instantly and permanently.
One of the biggest disadvantages would be that it would be hell on the barrel. It would cause terrible wear. I’d assume it would be used as an adamantium core with a copper jacket.
My off-the-cuff guess is that their armor-piercing ability would be massive. I suppose one way to calculate the difference is subtract the amount of kinetic energy that is consumed by the deformation process (of a lead bullet, for example). The difference should be slightly more than this, however, since as a bullet deforms (ie, flattens into a pancake), the pancake shape is in turn less capable of penetrating the armor.
In the case of an adamantium bullet, however, once the point penetrates, it’s in–and the cylindar part can continue to penetrate with its own kinetic energy. By this logic, if the bullets had needle-like points and were shot with sufficient force, they should be able to penetrate just about anything (how deep the projectile would go would be another matter, however; I can’t see why a simple sandbag couldn’t handle an adamantium bullet just as well as a lead one–in either case they’re both going to penetrate, and at that point the indestructability means squat).
One other advantage is that you could use the same bullet indefinitely. Economical.
Assuming (as the OP mentioned) adamantium has the same density as steel, you wouldn’t be able to deliver as much KE to the target as a convention lead bullet, or tungsten, or depleted uranium. Of course, you could always make a hollow adamantium bullet, and fill it with a denser material, to get the benfits of both. Since adamantium is probably expensive, this could save you quite a bit of money.
The fact that your bullet is indestructiable might be a disadvantage when firing on an unarmored target - the bullet will go right through them, causing only a relatively small hole; and after it flew through the person, it could still injure an innocent bystander. That is why normal bullets for self defense & hunting are designed to expand on purpose.
Overall, an admantium bullet, with a copper jacket, and maybe a core of tungsten/DU would be very effective if you need to punch though armor; less effective against soft targets.
Yeah, but you’d sure look like a dumbass searching all over the place for the bullet you fired! “Say, mister, have you seen my, uh, indestructible bullet? I used it to kill someone around here a little while ago and I’d love to have it back. Waste not, want not, you know?”
A plastic sabot would be better than a copper jacket. Copper jackets work because the soft lead core deforms. Copper alone isn’t ductile enough to groove in the rifling. Plastic sabots are used by some artilllery and special .30-06 ammunition that fires a .22 caliber bullet at extremely high velocities.
Don’t think that a non-deforming bullet wouldn’t cause damage in a soft target. Even a streamlined bullet will put some of its K.E. into the target causing massive damage. Ever shoot a melon with a FMJ bullet? Pretty nasty. Of course you’d have almost universal overpenetration problem but Stan doesn’t worry about such trifles.
Like others have said, adamantium bullets would chew up your bore something fierce, not be particularly heavy relative to normal copper/lead bullets, and probably be decent at armor piercing.
I don’t think that adamantium bullets would be worth much, myself.
Adamantium bullets might have some advantages in penetration- but only against hard things, like armor plating and concrete. Even then, it probably wouldn’t be a spectacular change from a steel AP round- it still takes a lot of energy to pierce those things. Versus things like wood, sandbags, etc… they wouldn’t perform materially different than steel- they slow down in those substances due to losing energy and friction, not due to deformation.
Versus soft targets, they wouldn’t show much difference from steel, and would cost more and likely be harder to produce, more expensive, etc…
So in short, the adamantium bullets would be vastly more expensive, for very little benefit.
Where adamantium would be useful is in armor piercing tank gun rounds and/or other larger caliber rounds.
I’m guessing that in * our * universe, an indestructible bullet would be less useful than the good old-fashioned kind, for reasons that have been discussed above.
In the * Marvel * universe, where you have various mutants and aliens who can disintegrate normal bullets with a glance, indestructible projectiles might come in handy.
Cue evil mutant: "Har, har. Your bullets can not harm me! My laser eyes will vaporize oh shit
And they might be somewhat more useful against the standard average superman with invulnerability as well, as they will not deform. So they wouldn’t penetrate, but the “ouch” factor would be higher. And they’d be very useful against characters with * almost * invulnerable skin.
Another thing to remember is that in the Marvel Universe you are much much more likely to encounter enemies with significant amounts of armor, what with all your battlesuits, robots, mutants, androids, aliens, cyborgs, Aesir, gamma-irradiated scientists and suchlike.
The armor-piercing character of adamantium is likely to be much more useful when fighting superbeings. Although an adamantium-jacketed lead slug with a sabot for rifling seems like the best way to use the stuff.
I know the OP postulated that adamantium has a similar density to steel, but do any of you Marvel Zombies know if that is canon?
[nitpick] They are designed to deliver maximum energy to a soft squshy target like a person which expansion faciliitates, it is not a design safety feature for bystanders. Hollowpoints are quite capable of passing through a target.
Nope the indistructible bullets would just put a hole in Wolverine that would be quickly healed by his mutant ability. Now if the bullet hit the indestructible adamantium skeleton I am not quite sure what would happen. My guess would be that wolverine would be knocked straight on his ass or the world would end what do I know?
According to an issue of Ultimate X-Men, they wouldn’t. Someone fired a few Adamantium slugs into his skull at point-blank range, and they just lodged in place in the soft tissue. It’s possible that the very tips of the bullets might have actually penetrated the metal of his skull, but it wasn’t enough to cause any damage to his brain, it seems. Also, since Logan hasn’t been running around with a bunch of little metal “horns” sticking out of his forehead, it seems he was able to remove the bullets later. The Adamantium didn’t fuse together, or anything.