Monday, December 23, 2013

Horrors! Now there's printed slugs! They can sneak them through airports and shoot down 747s!

By way of Bob Owens.

3 comments:

Storm'n Norm'n said...

I wonder how many Jihadists are running down to their local 3D printer store...

jon said...

looks like the shells are acting as a sabot for the pellet, which is doing the real penetration, aggravated by the crushing of the honeycomb just afterward.

this may serve as a more sophisticated method of paper patching. a rifle round fired from a smoothbore weapon at close range just starting to keyhole may appear to have been fired from further away (and obviously from a different weapon).

it obviously makes no economic sense yet to print bullets, but it does create possibilities for saboting metals you wouldn't normally want contacting your rifling.

ag42b said...

What jon said makes sense.

It reminds me of the sabots that black powder shooters use to load smaller bullets with better ballistic performance.

Interesting concept. The upcoming versions of sintered metal printers might have some promise.