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[NSFL] Injuries to a Russian soldier, presumably from a GLMRS M30A1 rocket with a tungsten bead warhead.
(i.imgur.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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I'm surprised they used beads instead of something with a straight/ ragged edge.
Beads are maybe easier to fill the entire space completely where something not spherical could be hard to maximize capacity.
I also think at the speed they’re traveling, getting hit with anything’s going to be a bad time.
But they could cut a pattern into layers of stamped steel and fill nearly 100%
I have no idea how that would change it's effectiveness to spread the material, though.
I have no idea, I’m just a guy rooting for Ukraine through any means necessary.
This munition is designed against hard targets (vehicles, etc) not necessarily personnel. Stamped steel would likely just splatter to pieces against hardened targets. Tungsten (72 on the periodic scale) is very dense, much more so that steel. That density means more kinetic energy gained from the dispersal explosive, and much greater penetrating power.
the reason for this is improved aerodynamics. when you can't control which way a given piece of metal faces, balls offer the least drag of all shapes. this is also reason for why tungsten is used in the first place
That was the main thing I was thinking. Predictable spread.
that's one thing, but another thing is that just after some few 10s of meters some fragmentation loses serious % of energy. you can counteract this by making it heavier, but then there's less of them (or use denser material, like tungsten instead of steel). it's also shape dependent. when distance is small anyway, like with SAM, this matters less and some kind of shape filling entire available space is used (like cubes)
If he bled out after the hit, he's just a body. A less deadly injury creates more soldiers rolling around in pain waiting for their turn to get every bead picked out.
I'm waiting for someone else to chime in but I don't think these injuries are from cluster bomblettes. These look closer to what a M30A1 rocket would do, which carry 130,000 tiny tungsten bbs.