Posted on 09/27/2023 9:19:02 AM PDT by Red Badger
When I worked in an overhaul facility for wide body commercial aircraft, I first encountered depleted uranium. The flight control counterweights on the Lockheed L-1011 were made of it. Maintenance manual said not to sand off corrosion if found on the surfaces. I believe Boeing and McDonnell Douglas also used DU for flight control counterweights.
I believe the sabot and shaped charge rounds behave similarly. There’s usually a copper cone or rod that gets turned into a superheated core penetrator once the shaped charge goes off, much like the DU sabot when it hits something. Both will fill any compartment immediately with a flash of superheated molten metal droplets that will set off any shells inside the vehicle and roasting the crew.
The effective range is 3000 meters (1.86 miles).
It's radioactive. 60% enriched. Not weapons grade fissile or suitable for power generation.
1.6 times heavier than lead. Space saver on aircraft.
How mny of these does Putin have?
I was thinking the same thing.
But I cannot imagine one of those rounds hitting a 60’s era tank. It won’t be pretty.
I thought we could put speakers on the tanks so I we can get a nice lady to calmly talk the Russians into surrendering.
“ The primary health risk associated with depleted uranium is not its radioactivity but rather its chemical toxicity.”
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I would think the primary risk would be the projectile coming at you at Mach 2. But…I might be wrong.
That might hurt!
Delta 21 wrote: “Better than anything smaller than 104mm. HEAT round aint no RPG.”
The DU rounds are 120MM.
Wrong answer.
Depleted uranium (DU; also referred to in the past as Q-metal, depletalloy or D-38) is uranium with a lower content of the fissile isotope U-235 than natural uranium. Natural uranium contains about 0.72% U-235, while the DU used by the U.S. Department of Defense contains 0.3% U-235 or less. The less radioactive and non-fissile U-238 constitutes the main component of depleted uranium.[emphasis added]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depleted_uranium
This is why they don't use the same tungsten penetrators in go-to-war rounds as they do in the training rounds, despite tungsten being more dense than DU. There's a pyrophoric effect accompanying the spall with the DU round that the tungsten/training penetrator doesn't get. Which means both burning material flaking off from the penetrator (producing secondary burns), and it makes the penetrator "self-sharpening." If doesn't blunt on impact, the material sloughs off in a pattern that produces a new, sharp point, which gives it better penetration capabilities than non-self-sharpening materials. Neither of which happens with tungsten.
If you want to be kind to Mother Nature, use tungsten penetrators. If you want to destroy your enemy and win the war, use DU.
Thanks for that post, and it was worth repeating.
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