We will keep it classic with an M4 Sherman firing a 76mm gun with HVAP (iirc it was the highest velocity armor piercing no explosive shell for it)an M60 wIth a 105mm tungsten carbide penetrator shell, and an M1 Abrams with it’s 120mm M829 DU shell.
So basically in these tests a standing human body is fired at center mass (so chest area) with each of these high velocity armor piercing shells, what happens? Does the upper half of the body explode, is a neat hole punched through, does the shell hit and leave a very messy yet still recognizable body?
I forgot WHERE I saw it but I saw a recent movie where a tanks AP shell hit a man and the guy was literally evaporated into a mist (and it didn’t explode either as the shell then traveled into a building leaving a circle in the side of a building) and wondered how accurate that was.
Bear in mind that a human is substantially a sack of water. What would happen to a sack of water if you hit it with a heavy projectile travelling at that speed?
It won’t just punch a hole. Water is incompressible so a shock wave travels outward from the point of impact. The end result is the sack of water would essentially spray outward in all directions.
Kim Jong-un is supposed to have done something similar (anti aircraft gun instead of armor piercing shell) with his uncle and some other people who showed “disrespect”, ask him.
It wouldn’t explode, though. It would pass through so easily that it wouldn’t detonate. Of course, it wouldn’t have to do so anyway because, as Princhester said, it would make a big “splat”.
Moral of the story- don’t disrespect Kim, you’ll end up catching a lot of flak.
I get the bit about sack of water and shock waves, but would there also be a rapid increase in the temperature of the water, instantaneously turning to steam and exploding whatever recognizable bits remaining?
I would think the shock wave would translate into motion away from the path of the projectile, basiclly a transfer of momentum in the direction of the shell plus a radial component due to each portion of the tissue encountering the inertail of adjacent material - so basically a cone-shaped splatter.
I knew some fellow who had picked up a stray cat that got extremely vicious. He had to take it out and kill it after it attacked the paperboy very badly. Basically, a shell meant to kill moose, at two hundred feet turned the bottom two thirds of the cat into hamburger.
This is now no.1 on my list of “things you’d never given a serious thought about and, now you have, you realise why you avoided thinking about it in any great detail”
At the back of my head I imagined a big but neat hole with subsequent bleeding out and loss of consciousness. I realise now that things would be more complicated than that. The adjective “complicated” is not something you want applied to a means of death.
In the Napoleonic era, lots of soldiers lost limbs to cannonballs. Note, balls, not chain shot, canister shot, grapeshot, etc. Some were killed by the shockwave of a cannonball passing near them.
However, this was much less powerful than in the above example, and I believe the cannonball was substantially larger as well.
AFAIK, 120mm APFSDS (M829A1- the “silver bullet”) goes about 1700 m/s, and is about 1" in diameter, 25" long, and weighs about 10 lbs (it’s depleted uranium).
So hitting a person isn’t going to slow it down significantly. Which makes sense, it’s meant to punch holes in 700mm (27") of rolled homogenous armor.
The question is whether or not it’ll just blow a hole through you that is roughly the size of the penetrator, or whether some kind of hydrostatic shock will blow you apart in the process.
As a point of reference, here is what happens when a .223 Remington slug hits a watermelon. The speed of the round would be half and the weight – 55 grains – miniscule compared to bump’s cannon round.
I think it’s reasonable to expect that a human body would react about like that watermelon, but that said, when I die, if someone from here would like to collect my body and shoot it with a tank to see, I’d be cool with that.
