A small insight into the world of ammunition, explosives, rockets, missiles, artillery, mortars, mines etc.

[Cobiee]

Damn man, sounds like a scene out of The Hurtlocker!!

[Erhard]

Let us talk about Small Caliber Ammunition.

Overview

Small Caliber Ammunition, is every caliber up until 14mm. This is what you primarily use in Squad. Your 5.57, 7.62, 12.7 etc, NATO and Russia alike. Small caliber ammunition is always a unit ammunition, this is where the projectile and propellant are held together by a case, all combined into a what’s called a cartridge. This includes a primer as well.



Here we’ll focus on five different projectiles:

• Full Metal Jacket (Sharp)

• Armor Piercing

• Armor Piercing Incendiary with/without Tracer

• Incendiary

• Tracer/light

There are also practice and educational, jacketed Hollow Point, jacketed Soft Point, flat nose etc. But those are not important here.

Full Metal Jacket (Sharp)

• Full Metal Jacket projectiles are what you can refer to as normal cartridges/rounds, normal ammunition. It’s made up of a core made of either steel or lead, surrounded by a shell made up of steel or tompak (a brass alloy from copper and zinc).

Armor Piercing

• As for Full Metal Jacket, here you have a core, a shell but also a tip pilled with lead. The core is made up of harden steel. The lead helps the harden steel core to punch though the target, by forming a supportive impact point, making sure the harden steel core tip doesn’t shatter on contact.

 
Armor Piercing Incendiary with/without Tracer

• This is similar to the regular Armor Piercing, but instead of the lead tip, this is now filled with flammable material, such as White Phosphor. These can be equipped with a tracer component to guide you to the target. This round is pure evil when used upon the correct targets.

Incendiary

• This is a more special, and sometime volatile projectile. The front is a mixture of barium nitrate and aluminum magnesium powder which burns on impact for a few tenths of a second. The rear is filled with lead, for protection and weight, and some projectiles comes with a small steel tube.

Tracer/light

• This projectile can either be, Full Metal Jacket, Armor Piercing, or Incendiary. Here the rear of the core is replaced with a light source, often made of strontium peroxide, strontium nitrate and magnesium, that burns a bright red colour. The light source is being lid by a small igniter made from barium peroxide and magnesium, which in turn is lid by the gasses developed my firing the projectile in the first place.

[Creation]

Go through det's timers and switches if you have the time. I have to spot IED's on X-ray images at work so any knowledge you have will be appreciated.

[Erhard]

Hmm. I'm debating with myself if that’s need to know or not. And since it’s part of your work, I would rather you got the current information from there, since there are dozens of different methods used to set off an IED, and you need to be 100% accurate (if possible) when dealing with IED's. Sorry.