Hoover Dam engineering question.

Any single explosion that could "leverage" the Hover dam would be a far more dangerous thing than the results of the dam failing in a catastrophic manner. The beast is 600 feet thick at the base. And effectively solid. Leverage away.

Al, it's really not applicable. There's no place for a solid chunk of concrete to implode to. If you tried to impact any of the easily availble edges of the dam, say with shaped charges as the guy you rightfully castigate above, all you'd do would be to chip small chunks off it. The minimum blast to even start water flowing over the reduced top would be many tons of H.E. Nothing short of a nuke is going to breech the dam. And if you *had* a nuke, and were prepared to use it for terrorism, why would you bother dragging it all the way out into the boonies to try to get a dam? And even with a nuke, you'd need some careful placement.

Anybody who gets a chance should take the "hardhat" tour of the Hover dam. You get to see lots of stuff you don't see on the regular, shorter tour. Socks

Dear Mark Folsom:

...

The rotor of a turbine engine was crashed into a concrete wall at high speed. It provided estimations of spallation effects on concrete structures that is used to this day.

An RPG round is an area weapon. It will not penetrate. It does its killing with shrapnel.

An active tank round will penetrate, an RPG will not. In my opinion.

And it is still Yuma (where the hell is Bullhead City) and Mexico that will suffer flooding, not Phoenix.

David A. Smith

how? the charge can affect steel, but not the round

an rpg can't make it thru six inches of sand. It's designed for metal armor, not concrete

and then?

zip - there are already holes larger than that all over in the dam

what is the effect of a one inch hole thru a ten foot diameter concrete bridge piling? nil.

about the same as a one inch hole thru a 300 foot concrete piling. 1/30 of nil

give it up - pull out the old texts and put numbers to it - many zeros means mucho hard to do, and in demolitions, it means mucho things that do not react they way you want them to.

The business end of a rocket-propelled grenade is a shaped-charge warhead. It melts through armor with a jet of super-hot gas. Because of the shape of the charge, it tends to cut straight through. The "area" behind the armor is then saturated with molten metal fragments.

Across the river from Laughlin, NV.

Some RPG's are fragmentation weapons, but most are shape charges.

Mark Folsom

Thanks for proving my point; the Humvee as delivered has no armor and is no more bullet (or shrapnel) proof than a SUV or pickup truck.

Any "armor" a Humvee has is a field expedient by the users, just like the chain link fencing put around some vehicles to catch RPGs.

Any explosive round, including a HEAT round, that goes off near a Humvee pretty much guarantees casualties.

Never did like the Humvee; too damn big with too many unprotected people in one place and hard to shoot back if you're inside. At least in the back of a 'duce you could shoot back. Only thing I ever thought they were good for was a trip to the PX.

Since they are a replacement for the Jeep (and made by a descendent of the Jeep manufacturer), that's just about right.