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Re: [OM] Aircraft ammunition pictures [OT for Oly list]

Subject: Re: [OM] Aircraft ammunition pictures [OT for Oly list]
From: Paul Wallich <pw@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 8 Jan 2001 12:13:49 -0500
At 1:56 PM +0000 1/8/01, Olaf Greve wrote:
The US Gatling-type aircraft guns make the coolest sounds as they wind up to speed (very quickly of course), firing their rounds. The sequence of sounds is: high-speed electric whine, very fast banging of the rounds firing followed by the firecrackers of sonic booms. If they were shooting explosive rounds the bangs at the target would follow the sonic booms.

I can only imagine...:)
Anyone who will ever have heard just how much sound a normal, say 9mm,
hand gun already makes when it is fired, will probably look in awe at
how laughably small such a bullet is when compared to the 20mm, 27mm, and especially the 30mm rounds pictured on my page. I wonder if the sound gets proportinally louder as the size of the rounds (well, the casings, really) increases. Makes me wonder what the sound would have been that was produced when the 120mm Howitzer casing I have at home was fired. Then, to take things to the extreme: I don't think I would have particularly liked being close to the guns that were used on ships like the USS Missouri to send the 800+ KG projectiles on a one way ticket towards the enemy. ;)

A couple of data points: my uncle, who served in the royal artillery in ww2
(after first being interned as an enemy alien) acquired a substantial
hearing deficit over the course of a year or so; for the battleships
I have read that the decks are cleared around the guns when firing, because
the shock wave can be lethal at close range. This gets out of the range of
what one usually thinks of as sound and into that of weather.

paul

--
Paul Wallich                                            pw@xxxxxxxxx

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