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Date Posted: 07:34:49 01/03/13 Thu
Author: bill
Author Host/IP: 71.172.178.254
Subject: Re: Kerry as Sec. of State
In reply to: D Jam 's message, "Re: Kerry as Sec. of State" on 22:05:17 01/02/13 Wed

As DU metal is the densest material that they have at present that can be used for military projectiles it was a natural progression to use it for this purpose before they were even aware of the other things that took place when it is used in this manner.
For decades gun tech ( menaing artillery both land and particularly Naval ) kept going for larger projectile to defeat better armor as that was developed and powder tech developed from black powder which burns quickly to smokeless which burns slower allowing longer barrels hence more projectile speed and a flatter trajectory.
When the distance at which a shell could be fired acurately got beyond a certai point the flat trajectory gave way to long distance high arc trajectories to allow penetration from above with more accuracy and changed the equation for how they figured gunnery in battle situations.
As the size hence diameter of the shell is increased the penetrating power increased exponentially to the caliber because the weight of the projectile is not directly proportional to the change in outside diameter.
When they reached a theoretical limit to the available technology of diameter and weight and trajectory it was found that a heavier shell fired at a lower muzzle velocity had more penetrating power from a high arc than a similar shell at a hihgher velocity on a flatter arc.
The next step post WW II would be increasing the weight of the projectile without increasing the diameter making the idea of using depleted uranum ( in this case enclosed inside of a steel or other metal casing ) the next logical step.
It was discovered that the Du had those properties that also caused the metal to burn during the process of development and those prperties were also exploited for obvious reasons like that it would " burn " through the armor as it consumed itself and set fire to any munitions encased in the armored target.

DU because of it's density and weight advantage was once used by a racing boat for the counterweight on the keel but that was eventually replaced with nore common Lead when the dangerous properties of the metal were more understood as well as the toxicity factor which is somewhat more so than the lead previously used and still used today.
If DU is encased it is safe unless in a high velocity collision but can be toxic if the coating is removed by accident.
In armor tech if encased in side of a protective coating as a backer it reinforces the strength of same by resisting penetration purely by weight alone. However if the shell fired at the armor is also DU I would expect that the results would be less than satisfactory if it sets fire to the armor itself, something that would not occur with a conventional projectile where it would be a distinct advantage.

As for civilian use I suppose that there could be some things under development that would work better with DU but for now the main uses are probably those of a military application.

One thing to think about is that in order not to use large amounts of the material it has mainly been limited to small arms and things like tank buster shells while the military has developed other ways of doing things it could be much more efficient at like those super large bunker buster bombs they talked about around the time of gulf war one which were high concentrations of conventional explosives and limited in just how deep or how thick of a bunker they were effective against so not really used that much as they required a large aircraft to deliver them to the target location making the system much more subject to being intercepted if total control of the air was not first taken.

I think they probebly began at the end of the second world war with Du reseach but an effective use was not put into the system till the end of the Vietnam war and might not have been used there even if it was available at the time. Nam was still a war where conventional weapons were being used for many reasons not the l;east of whcih was the post hiroshima fear of nuclear war as well as the " need " to " use up " a lot of WW II and Korean war leftover munitions that were on the point of being useless and slated for disposal. A lot of those munitions were disposed of at Picatinny arsenal near here and the occcasional large explosion in the distance was not uncommon for quite some time here from the fifties through the seventies and even the eighties before they wound down the program and ramped up the cleanup of the arsenal grounds which may still be an ongoing process thanks to all the ordinance that was disposed of there some of which did not explode when it was supposed to and was being dug up and destroyed up unitl not long ago.

b

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