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Old 05-08-2017, 03:34 PM   #34
weby
 
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Default Re: High Amounts of non penetrating damage. Bullets VS Plate Carriers

Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony View Post
More like 3200J, but what do you mean by 'spread'? Very little of the kinetic energy gets transferred into movement of the plate -- most of it gets expended on heat, sound, possible ricochet and fragments, and deformation or cracking of projectile and plate, and the job of the armor is to make sure most of that occurs on the outside, not the inside.
What I mean with spread is that all that energy has to go somewhere, as example by the methods given by you. Different materials do different things when that energy comes in but it has to deal with it somehow. It is not simply the penetration through that has to be stopped but also the amount of internal bulging has to be limited. A modern style hard body armor is a compromise of the different requirements. Some types are better at single shot protection but the best materials/weight for such tend to not be anything close to the optimal for resisting multiple shots.

So as example of the thing I am talking about: You have a armor optimized to stop 5.56N AP round, but just barely to keep it light accepting that some deformation is OK as long at it is not at life threatening levels. So the armor stops the bullet and deforms X amount. Then the armor is hit by a 7.62N Ball round. In case the face of the armor is not able to bounce the round by deflection type mechanisms there should likely be some deformation.

In the proposed model such a vest(DR 35 in GURPS terms) would thus cause 1 HP crush though with 5.56 but the 7.62 would not even come close to doing it. I find this unrealistic for plates where part of the protection mechanism is the deformation.
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