[Chainmail]

I was involved in some of the design elements of the FRAG-12 about 15 years ago. Initially, it had single-element fuze and almost always lost a fin during firing and went somewhere - just not where you were aiming and sometimes it went off in the shotgun bore.

I was brought in to redesign the round to fly straight and to improve the safety of the fuzing and I designed the shaped charge armor-piercing round.

It carries a half ounce of A-5 explosive and has a three element bore-safe fuze now. The main success is its range and accuracy: we could hit a doorknob sized object from 50m off and it would blow the door lock out of the door when it hit, leaving a big fist-size hole. It was capable of hitting a man at 200m.

The armor-piercing round is capable of penetrating 1/2 inch of hardened armor plate, which makes a shotgun effective against most armored cars.

From the photos, it looks like they have redesigned the center section, so I am assuming that its flight characteristics are similar to what they were 15 years ago.

Nifty piece of gear - the only reason that it didn't make it into Iraq was that the navy engineer at Dahlgren wanted to be hired to design the fuzing system and when they didn't use him, he blocked safety approval for the navy. The army wanted 5,000 rounds for their safety approval tests and the company was too small to afford that many rounds for testing.

[whistleduck]

Would it be correct to assume arming took place after so many fin section rotations?

[BTerclinger]

“I was brought in to redesign the round to fly straight and to improve the safety of the fuzing and I designed the shaped charge armor-piercing round.”

Please put me on your ping list
(or at least keep me off your enemies list ( : >)

[Doc91678]

Sounds good to me... the physics of creating a cartridge of that lethality, stability and accuracy is way beyond my kin. Yet again getting that all into such a small package less than 3.5 inches is fantastic.