71–80 of 89 posts
I read about it as a child. On earth, molten metals readily lose gas by the force of gravity, but in space, you can easily make metal foams that will be very strong and light. Sounds like a good material for spacecrafts. Also, how about glass foam? I imagine you can blow large and cheap hulls from foamed molten glass.
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That would be outstanding if it could ... talk about the perfect material for shielding supercritical spacecraft components. Radiation resistance, projectile resistance, lighter than normal metal, temperature resistant... What's not to like?
You still need to make it fit, and this shielding may require more volume and more mass than a Whipple shield.
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Better start with four so you're ready for the next shielding upgrade.
How about 180? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xe-QP8s1ZJc
This doesn't have much in the way of interesting details, you need to go to the paper for that. The armour is a composite sandwich, with boron carbide on the front face (a hard ceramic), followed by the metal foam, and either aluminium or kevlar on the rear face. The boron carbide layer blunts the bullet and distributes the compressive stress over a large area of the metal foam. The metal foam is made of 2mm-diameter…
There's a 4th layer: The whole thing is vacuum-wrapped in epoxy-fiberglass composite to catch spall.
> Spall are flakes of a material that are broken off a larger solid body and can be produced by a variety of mechanisms, including as a result of projectile impact, corrosion, weathering, cavitation, or excessive rolling pressure (as in a ball bearing)
This doesn't have much in the way of interesting details, you need to go to the paper for that. The armour is a composite sandwich, with boron carbide on the front face (a hard ceramic), followed by the metal foam, and either aluminium or kevlar on the rear face. The boron carbide layer blunts the bullet and distributes the compressive stress over a large area of the metal foam. The metal foam is made of 2mm-diameter…
There's a 4th layer: The whole thing is vacuum-wrapped in epoxy-fiberglass composite to catch spall.
Would this be effective against micrometeoroids and orbital debris?
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No. You're confusing consistency with accuracy . To hit someone in the eye, you've got to aim at their eye and land a round there. That is, accuracy at hitting a pre-specified target. To hit armour in the same location twice, you need either two (or more rounds) delivered consistently on whatever happens to be where the first round lands . It's a case where being a Texas Sharpshooter actually works (painting bullseye…
At that point, wouldn't it be easier and just as effective to use a single, larger round? .50-cal rifles already exist; no need to invent a big bullet that turns into two smaller bullets. (Unless you mean something that starts out the same size as the one in the video, in which case I can't imagine that two halves of a .30-06 would penetrate any better than one whole .30-06.)
And of course there are things like RPG-30 Kryuk to exploit that - fires two rounds, the first, triggering round is small and just enough to trigger the protective armor, and they're both fired at once from the same device to ensure that they hit the same spot just one of them tuned to hit juuuust a bit before the main round.
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Presumably very expensive and one-time usable. I guess that's true of most types of armour anyway.
Dragon Skin ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Skin ) claimed to withstand multiple hits without loss of performance, although there was some controversy around it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYaSRIbPWkM&nohtml5=False
[1] " rel="nofollow">https://www.quora.com/Why-was-Dragon-Skin-armor-rejected-by-...
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I thought the slats were to provide stand off distance for explosively formed projectiles. If the explosively formed jet forms more than a few inches from the armor, it's way less effective.
Nope, we had them in Iraq before EFPs were really a thing (Thanks Iranain Quds Force for that). They were specifically for RPGs, which was one of the few things that could take out a Stryker without it. They even tried those Soviet parachute anti-tank grenades, but the Stryker is much faster than a tank and just moved away in time. That being said, the I'm sure this slat (birdcage as we called it) armor would help wi…