Posted on 12/30/2012 8:35:51 AM PST by Hardraade
This is a typical howto-question.
Take a typical 7.62 bullet. Posit that it knows exactly where it is, and where it should be.
How do you change direction, with the equipent being small enough to fit onboard with the position sensor?
Point the gun barrel in a different direction.
Heh.
Fire it from a smart phone. There’s prolly an app for this.
Newton’s Laws of Motion?
My question is why would someone want such a bullet? “Smart” bombs made defeating enemies nearly impossible. They made people expect that so-called “innocents” would not be harmed and led to the staging of collateral damage which the liberal media love to cover. “Smart” bullets would further that fallacy and the media would use the unrealistic expectations of technology to further push their anti gun agenda. No thank you.
IIRC, the sabot, at least in an M-1 Abrahms isn’t even formed until striking the target. The entire round could be considered a sabot, I guess, but the killing part comes on impact.
“Innocents not be harmed...” Yeah, slippery slope.
Brain Storm: How about cops use smart bullets that guide on bad guys. Or just ‘wing them’.
(I want to throw in a Will Rogers comment about a headline: ‘Innocent New Yorkers shot on the street’ and he says ‘That’s the best shooting ever done in this town. Hard to find four innocent people in New York.’)
Now how to designate a bad guy? Implant a chip? Image recognition of someone holding a gun? Facial image comparison with NSA data base?
Or home on images of 4-legged fur-covered objects with wagging tails.
In reality a 7.62 has so much linear and rotational inertia it would be hard to get a control surface big enough to deflect its ballistic path very much. Note how the .50 cal has about 4 times the original bullet size for the new tail.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabot
I know that part. Like the plastic surround a sabot slug in a load-your-own muzzle loader.
I was talking more about the actual final sabot that is formed on an M-1 Sabot round shell.
I also like the possibility that if a bad guyl/gal is shooting at me I may be a better shot than him/her.
The Sabot “bullet” has a lightweight, full caliber outer shell, and a sub-caliber, high density ‘core’ specifically shaped for penetration. Upon impact the outer shell is stripped off, and the high l/d ratio core has much concentrated energy to enable penetration.
That’s essentially what I already said in #6 for the M-1 Sabot Round.
Sorry, my engineering past has emerged. In my terminology, the sabot is the outer shell. The sabot does not form on impact, but already has its form at launch and covers the penetrator till impact.
But yes, the M-1 sabot is a tank killer.
The other armor piercing round is the HEAT (High Explosive Anti Tank) round. This round has a shaped charge embedded in the shell and detonates at a precise distance from the armor, sending a nearly pinpoint jet of hot gas into the armor, hopefully breaching that armor.
The original M1 Abrams had the same M68 105mm rifled cannon as the M60A3.
The M1A1/M1A2 upgraded to the Rheinmetall M256 120mm smoothbore (also used on the Leopard 2 and the ROK K1A1). Spin-stabilizing (i.e. "rifling") a projectile at the velocities of the 120mm sabot round would actually result in the projectile veering in flight in the direction of the spin, so designers went with fin stabilization and a smoothbore cannon. The sabots do in fact, discard in flight...
Change your position and fire again. Simple is usually better and cheaper.
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