Quote:
Originally Posted by speculum jockey
As for aluminum skins deflecting and dissipating energy from MG rounds, yes and no.
Aluminum is a very soft metal and bullets have little to not trouble penetrating multiple layers of it. Sure you can have a bullet impact at a very extreme angle or at the end of its effective range, but for the most part rounds keep on trucking. A guy I know went out to the bush to test out a new (new to him, but old) .30-30 rifle. This is pretty much the weakest .30 cal rifle out there. He accidentally (negligently) put a round through the side of his mini-van and it went clear out the other side. It went through the outer panel, through one of the support beam leading to the roof, through the plastic casing, through the entire second row passenger seat (metal frame, 4 feet of foam, and then through the other side's plastic casing, support frame, and outer panel.
Bullets do a lot of strange things, but against soft or thin metals they usually go straight through and only vary their trajectory slightly. Hence He-111's coming back intact, but with mostly dead crewmembers.
In your typical WWII airframe the only things that are going to stop them are armour plates, metal cylinders, the engine, or other hard metal fixtures that are not part of the actual airframe and shell.
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I think you make a good point
A lot of people seem to not understand how much damage a rifle-caliber bullet can really do. Movies and TV are the basis for a lot of opinions I think.
The 'small' .303 and it's US .30 cousins could go through
trees. At the Springfield Armory museum in Massachusetts, USA is a fascinating series of thick hardwood blocks that were shot with .30 and .308 caliber rifle rounds, from M1 and M14 rifles. Well over a foot of penetrating from either round. I recall the .308 as having a 19" penetration through solid hardwood
And that's a single shot, not a barrage of sustained automatic fire pummeling the hardwood block, just one single round.
02-20-2011, 06:38 PM
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