I own a .50 BMG rifle, and shoot both regular ball and AP through it in my backyard. It doesn’t have any magical abilities - it just puts nice, neat little half-inch holes in things. Though a buddy once brought over a ¼-inch hardened steel plate, and an AP round did not go through it. (Not sure what the Rockwell hardness was.) Interestingly, a round from my buddy’s .22-250 rifle did go through the plate.
I figure the defense philosophy preferred by ironclad designers wasn’t to try to stop projectiles cold, but to deflect the round. Seeing that you are on the side of the river, possibly up in a tree, you won’t be shooting the armor flat on. With a powerful enough weapon you could still penetrate the armor, but the bullet would be deflected on the inside, so I would think it would be difficult to snipe at particular targets.
My guess anyways.
What if the shot was lower? Below the waterline? 30-50 rounds thru both sides? slow it down? sink it?
Guess the easiest thing would be to know where the boiler was exactly. Thirty rounds in the general area of the boiler ought to do the trick?
I’ve read that in the days of wooden war ships, besides trying to incapacitate the ship structure (sails, rudder, etc), the main point was to decimate the crew (think projectiles hitting a wooden ship and sending flying wood shrapnel everywhere).
As such, I think it would be impossible to defeat an Armored Civil War Gunboat with a single armor piercing rifle. You’d have to:
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Kill/incapacitate enough of the crew to make the boat dead in the water. (However, the boat could still drift away with the current to be mopped out and put back in service).
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Sink the boat. This seems virtually impossible with a single rifle.
Wouldn’t shooting through the water drastically reduce your penetration?
As I recall, faster rounds actually have a harder time penetrating water, due to the fact that water doesn’t compress or some such. The harder you push, the harder the water pushes back. So low velocity rounds tend to travel through the water with relative ease (if not as well as through air), and high-velocity rifle rounds and .50BMG rounds fragment badly on impact. So trying to shoot below the water line might not net you much success.
Someone email the Box Of Truth guy, this sounds like something he should figure out for us.
That was exactly the result Mythbusters got. Handgun rounds and shotgun slugs were lethal through ~6’ of water, while the .223 (I think) and .50 rounds pretty much disintegrated instantly on hitting the water.
Wanted “Water-Piercing Rounds, 50 cal” ?
Essentially, I am back to where I began… concentrate shots in the area of boiler, hopefully knocking out boiler, but definately killing everyone around it. I am assuming the boiler would have to be in the vicinty of below the smokestack and above the waterline.
I’m thinking Armor Piercing, AP, Incindiary, AP, AP I etc in that order.
Steam engine boilers often exploded.
I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t be interested in the original mission.
But such a rifle would do wonders againt Confederate officers on a battlefield.
Or the boat builders back at the port.
Box of Truth did test the effectiveness of sandbags, and got a broadly similar result: handgun rounds penetrated further than rifle rounds. Astonishing really how effectively water and loose sand disperse kinetic energy.
Based on this, I don’t think you’d have a chance of sinking or disabling the boat. Unless Crafter_Man happened to have a bad batch of ammo at the time. Maybe you can get some bullets with more juice, or special materials. Teflon coating, depleted uranium, tungsten core, something along those lines.
Or perhaps some other elements of the ships would be more visible and vulnerable. Steering gear for the rudder, maybe? Paddle wheels, or even the paddles themselves?
All Teflon coated rounds do is make the gun a bit less likely to jam. The Teflon doesn’t actually have much effect on the round’s ballistic performance.
Oh, so some etymological fun, a while back I figured out that “Ball”, “Bullet”, and “Round” all have similar etymological origins, going back to a Latin word meaning “Round thing”. I was actually a bit disappointed, because I was hoping “Bullet” was suppose to mean “Small Bull”, as in the big angry animal that forcibly stabs people who piss him off. 
What then was all the hoohaw about Teflon covered bullets piercing police armored vests some years back?
Looking at the information on the Cairo, it occurs to me that disabling her paddle wheel or wheelhouse with a couple of shots may be nearly as good as blowing her up. Disable her propulsion, and the next thing you know, she’s a heavy metal ship on a riverbank-or worse.
I had thought about that (wheelhouse), but am uncertain about how they were built back then and have not been able to find a good drawing/diagram, ie, I wouldnt really know where to shoot except “at the rear of the boat”. I think the wheelhouse was concealed.
Yes, shooting the Union officers would be a valid secondary target. I would imagine you could do some damage from a mile away with the 50 cal rounds today also with any stores of ammo etc.
Not quite. The projectile design plays a part in it all.
If Mythbusters had bothered doing any research, they’d have known that the 5.56 NATO bullet bullet will yaw after only a few inches of penetration, then fragments. The .50cal apparently also yaws and fragments form what I’ve found.
The 5.45x39 bullet fired by the AK-74, which has a muzzle velocity of 2900+fps, does not fragment though it yaws even earlier.
The two most famous Civil War ironclads, the Monitor and the Merrimac, left very little exposed. The most one could say is that the Merrimac had more holes for you to shoot through.
Media bullshit. The press latched onto it and ran amok with a bunch of misinformation, like they did with the eeeeevil Black Talon bullet in the early 90’s.
The Teflon coated bullet, or KTW, was designed to allow bullets to penetrate windshields more effectively. The Teflon doesn’t increase penetration – the fact that the bullet is made from tungsten/steel is what does it.