kniz
May 10, 2002, 5:41am
21
[ul]or a **water pistle! ** :eek:[/ul]
*Originally posted by Chronos *
The action & chamber certainly aren’t water-tight. So this idea would only work if you keep the muzzle pointing straight up. Even then, you’d only have one shot as you duly noted.
Supercavitating bullets.
http://www.subsim.com/ssr/page33.html
Basically, if the bullet/torpedo/sub is the right shape (esp. the nose) and it’s traveling fast enough, it will cause a “bubble” of water vapor to be formed around it. Then you only have drag on the very tip of the projectile; the rest is traveling through a gas.
…in the early 1990s, the US had established its own supercavitation programme. To begin with, it concentrated on unpowered projectiles–underwater bullets. When conventional projectiles are fired into
In 1997, they proved it. Just a few years after Shkval’s [the Russian torpedo that first demonstrated the possibilities of supercavitation] debut, NUWC researchers announced they had gone supersonic. An unpowered projectile, with a carefully designed flat nose and fired from an underwater gun, broke the sound barrier in water. That’s nearly 5400 kilometres per hour–or 1.5 kilometres per second.
Lacking any onboard power to sustain its motion [Shkval, and presumably any subs they’re working on, is rocket-propelled], the shell slowed rapidly, but this was still a vivid demonstration of the speeds that supercavitation makes possible. Already they aren’t very far off the 2.5 kilometre-per-second speed record for conventional munitions in air, and NUWC scientists have calculated that their supercavitating projectiles should be able to match or even surpass this.
Even without reaching such dizzying speeds, supercavitating bullets are being put to good use. The navy would like to be able to clear mines at sea by simply shooting at them from the air … In the Rapid Airborne Mine Clearance System (RAMICS), projectiles are shot from a standard 20-millimetre Gatling gun. With their blunted cone-shaped noses, the laser-targeted bullets will be fired from more than 350 metres above the water, travel 12 metres through it and still be able to zap a mine. “We have to penetrate a steel wall and still have enough residual kinetic energy to ignite the explosive,” says Doug Todoroff, project sponsor of RAMICS at the Office of Naval Research (ONR). The system has so far only been test fired on the ground, but next month it is scheduled for its first airborne demonstration, firing on a full-size live mine from a Cobra helicopter. Todoroff sees the project as a cost-effective way of neutralising a dangerously cheap weapon.
Shodan
May 10, 2002, 5:06pm
24
Couldn’t you just put your pistol inside a big enough ziplock bag? If you could get your finger on the trigger, you could fire the thing - once.
Although I am still worried about my eardrums.
Regards,