Tungsten electrodes for armor piercing bullets

I'm no expert on armor at all. But, ONE INCH? Have you seen what the Army and Air Force use for armor piercing ammo? Like the 30 mm rounds for the A-10? These things weigh a whole POUND each, and are SOLID U-238 (both hard and heavy as hell!) The armor they are trying to pierce is about that thick, as far as I know. A tank couldn't possibly have steel armor too much more than an inch thick, or it would be too heavy to move.
Jon

I shot through railroad tie plates (mild steel) with 7.62 mm Mosin Nagant, using 50 year old ammo. They are, what, 1/2" thick?
Frontal armor on a tank can be much thicker than one inch, such as 4 inches or more. Plus, tank armor is stronger than mild steel, due to metallurgy, use of composite materials etc. And I was asking about 1 inch of mere mild steel.
i

The old Nam era M133 armoured personnel carrier had 1.25" of armour in places. The new M1A1 Abrams has an incredible 800mm or 31" of of armour *equivilent* on the turret.

That would be some kind of composite material, right? Layers of various metals, and other materials, etc. Is that correct?
i

The 7 maggy, is a poor AP round. The bullets are too soft for the velocity. Same as most overbore magnums.
I suggest you drill a 160gr in a collet, and insert a 1/8" chunk of tungsten. The tungsten tends to be a bit brittle, but the impact of the rest of the bullet will get the plate at the point of impact, nearly red hot..and the penetrator will go a surprising distance beyond normal crater depth.
Or so they say. I read it somewhere. Yup..thats it...read it.
Gunner
"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire. Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us) off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give them self determination under "play nice" rules.
Think of it as having your older brother knock the shit out of you for torturing the cat." Gunner

LOL...Ah Jon? A 3006 will just about punch an inch of CRS at 100 yrds
Tank armor used to be T1 plate..many inches thick, and the glacis plates..feet thick.
Now its composit armor, various layers of ceramic, kevlar, aluminum and steel. Google "Cobham armor"
And there are dead spaces between some of the layers to help break up the flame front jet from shaped charges.
Ive got a set of standard 3/4" HRS plates that I hang from chains for gongs and I have to weld them up or replace them every couple years. Standard 308 FMJ will penetrate fully a half inch at 400 yrds and a smidge more at 500 yrds. Can you tell me why it penetrates less at closer ranges?
Which will shoot though a standard stop sign..a 22 rifle or a 22 pistol, both shooting the same cartridge and at the same 25ft range?? (shooting stop signs is NOT recommened btw)
Gunner
"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire. Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us) off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give them self determination under "play nice" rules.
Think of it as having your older brother knock the shit out of you for torturing the cat." Gunner

On Sun, 30 Oct 2005 22:16:39 -0600, with neither quill nor qualm, Jon Elson quickly quoth:
(Ig, you meant to say "_Someone_ could, conceivably, cast...", right?)
...with 3' of explosive-filled shell behind them.
Much of the newest armor is a lighter-weight _ceramic_!
-------------------------------------- PESSIMIST: An optimist with experience -------------------------------------------- - Web Database Development

I could double check, but it is my recollection that possessing AP bullets is not illegal, at least in the US in general. High power rifles, such as 7mm Rem Mag, give their bullets so much energy that pretty much any bullets from these rifles can go through pretty much all "bulletproof" vests. A vest that could stop a bullet of this nature would not be practical to carry.
So, then, when we talk about AP rounds in the context of these high power rifles, we'd be talking about rounds that can penetrate thick steel plates, not a situation to be relevant for our everyday life and even everyday crimes.
It is purely a theoretical discussion as it is not relevant to practical life.
i

And how will you melt it? Assuming you would. Tungsten has a melting point of 3400°C.
Nick

Gunner
I would suspect that the velocity at a short distance is higher that at long range and that is the cause of better penetration at longer ranges.
Energy transfer verse velocity, may be more efficient at lower velocity.
Hugh Not a ballistician.

That's true for almost rifles of roughly that size - .30-06, .308, 7mm mag, and god-only-knows how many others. Basically anything that size is going to fit in the category "armor piercing" when loaded with plain old off-the-shelf deer bullets.
When I asked a cop I know (who, at the time, was bragging about his spiffy new state-of-the-art, top-of-the-line vest - "This sucker will stop damn near anything!") "So, if it's so great and protects so well, what happens if I point my .30-06 at you and pull the trigger?", he flinched a bit, then in a very matter-of-fact tone replied "Well, I'm probably gonna drop like a steer in a slaughterhouse, then quietly lay there and bleed to death - assuming I'm not already dead before I hit the ground."
Oddly enough, I haven't heard him say diddly-squat about his ever-so-strong vest since... :)

Even if his vest stopped the bullet, it still would transfer almost 100% of the bullet's momentum on him. That would amount to being hit with a high speed paddle. The momentum would be the same as the rifle's recoil (which is painful), only transferring more energy because of higher speed of the affected area of the vest, compared to the speed of rifle moving backwards.
IOW, the discussion that I started is not of practical nature.
i

Oh, that's without question. The point I am/was making is that just about any of the "big deer rifles" (Pretty much anything that's reasonably comparable to a .30-06, .308, .300 savage, or similar) is, in and of itself, an "armor piercing" weapon unless you're shooting nothing but plain, soft lead bullets through it. There's just *SO MUCH* "oomph" involved, behind such a (comparatively) small cross-section, that it can hardly help punching through like tissue-paper.
The "scary" part is that something like an off-the-shelf .30-06 isn't even really all that "high powered" a load by the standards that today's magnum and ultra-magnum loads use.
(That's *NOT* saying that a .30-06 isn't "high powered enough"... How could anyone sane make that claim when it's generally considered to be "plenty of rifle" for practically anything that walks, flies, crawls, or slithers on the north American continent? Never mind the crazy folks who have used it for taking African "big game", up to and including rhinos and elephants...)

3006 ammunition is 7.62 mm calibre, isn't it? I don't know much about guns, but I do recall that the armour used on the famous "Pig" trucks in Northern Ireland was a little under an inch thick, and this was regarded as being adequate protection against the armour piercing 7.62 mm rounds available to the IRA in the 1970s. Now it was definitely welded steel armour, but it may not have been mild steel, and I'm not sure of the range at which it offered protection, but the British Army found that it did the job.
Chobham armour. I believe it was first used on the British Challenger I tank, and it's probably a good foot thick. Tanks just have huge engines and wide tracks to cope with the weight.
The rifle because it has the longer barrel, so the bullet has more time to accelerate, is that right?
Iggy might also like to check out this link. Look at the Steyr round next to the regular 7.62 mm. That is one big AP round:
Chris

There is no unless here. Even lead bullets would have great penetration.
Correct.
Never liked those, I think that they are a marketing gimmick to sell expensive ammunition.
I cannot see why one would hunt rhinos and elephants, sorry, I am completely against it.
i

7.62 is a caliber for all kinds of ammunition (7.62x39, 7.62x54, 7.62x51, etc etc). These different cartridges have different bullet weights and velocities and cannot be grouped together.
You are 100% correct.
That's a sabot cartridge, another concept worth exploring wrt tungsten. Now, I have no "material targets" worth destroying, and I would rather sell these electrodes or use for for making big arcs, but the concept of a homemade AP round is interesting.
i

I have read that almost any shotgun load, even with small shot, will penetrate the common police dept. vest at close range when the shot is still in a ball.
Randy

Chuckle...the ancient .30 Mauser pistol cartridge, often found in the old broomhandled Mauser and other "obsolete" handguns, will generally sail right through a Level II vest like it was lace. Often doesnt make it completly through the other side of the vest..but the wearer is not likely to be terribly concerned one way or another.
Im aware of two cases also of deaths by blunt force trauma, one case the wearer was shot at nearly point blank range by a 12ga shotgun delivering a slug. It busted the sternum, blew out the aorota and pretty much tenderized the heart. Think bag of goo. The other was an officre who was tagged with a 475gr round out of a 45-70 at about 25 yrds. He managed to survive nearly a week, before the internal organs simply gave up. Another bag of goo. In neither case was the vest penetrated.
Bullet "proof" vests, arent. Some are more bullet Resistant than others however. Adding a ceramic "chicken plate" helps things tremendously, but also adds some big issues to flexability, and comfort. Vests at best of times are hot and somewhat uncomfortable, adding a ceramic plate to the front, back or both, really makes for some issues. Though a good one will stop..yes stop, a .308 round. Im told its like getting smacked with a sledgehammer though.
When vests first became commonly available in the early 70s, many police departments bragged about their officers having them. Then wondered why so many cops were dying of head wounds.. The perps simply understood you had to pop em in the head to stop em. And did so.
Sigh..and Im personally aware of one case, where a fairly new cop, equipped with the latest high tech geegaws, bells and whistles..and wearing the latest and greatest state of the art vest, got into a struggle with a guy armed with a .32, who put it into the cops armpit and pulled the trigger. That slow, miserably weak bullet punctured the lung, clipped the right descending aorta, punctured the other lung and lodged in the other arm. The coroner had to flip a coin as to what actually was the cause of death..the deflation of both lungs collapsing and smothering the heart, or the bleed out from the leak in the aorta. He was gone in less than a minute either way. Not gonna put a bandaid on that sort of wound.
Ive not seen any data yet on vests versus the new .17 H&R cartridge, though there are several handguns now made for it. The bottlnecked 5.7 x28 is a newish pistol cartridge specificly designed to penetrate body armor. Another fine product from Fabriqe Nationale, and becoming very popular in handguns and submachine guns by military and paramilitary forces around the globe.
And of course..we cannot forget the fine Tornado bullet, used by the BATF to shoot each other to doll rags at the Waco clusterfuck.
Gunner
"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire. Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us) off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give them self determination under "play nice" rules.
Think of it as having your older brother knock the shit out of you for torturing the cat." Gunner

The impulse energy is spread over the surface area of the rifle butt, but is a point source of say.... .355"....at the impact area. But its Scientific..and fun.
Gunner
"Pax Americana is a philosophy. Hardly an empire. Making sure other people play nice and dont kill each other (and us) off in job lots is hardly empire building, particularly when you give them self determination under "play nice" rules.
Think of it as having your older brother knock the shit out of you for torturing the cat." Gunner