Which given the shape and thickness of a bomb casing would require an exceptionally lucky shot, even if they didn’t fuse when penetrating the aircraft itself.
irrelevant, it’s perfectly safe to light C-4 or gelignite and cook dinner on it, HE has to be heated for an extended period before it reaches “cook off” temperature
Kinetic energy.
This is an exaggerated example with nitroglycerine but you get the idea:
The same way a HE round damages a tank. Either by shrapnel penetrating thinner areas or by creating shockwaves and inner casing spalling.
That point I’ll likely agree to, i don’t have enough knowledge to say how easy it is IRL for any of the existing in game filler variants to explode from outside force.
I don’t think you understand how incendiary rounds work
GP bombs have relatively thin casings, far less than 10mm on their sides
and how many of the bombs in-game use C4 as a filler?
It’s not irrelevant as different fillers are differently sensitive.
depends on the type doesn’t it?
an example, I’m not about to start posting the compositions of various explosive mixtures for a number of reasons
Not really? Most if not all incendiary ammo burn at very high temperatures of over 2200C/4000F (and this is for civilian grade incendiary ammo)
sure but temperature alone doesn’t accelerate the rate of combustion to the speeds requires to detonate most high explosives, most have nitro-glycerine mixed in just to make detonation possible, the require the denotator to set off a booster to set of the main charge, for example Ammonium nitrate requires about half a stick of dynamite as a detonation device, which requires a detonator to initiate, remove the detonator and it burns like a candle.
*in most modern high explosives
I don’t think anyone would want to go near a bomb factory that is on fire. pressure buildup from heat will probably make detonation more likely. Think of solid rocket engines, if done incorrectly and not given a big enough exhaust they quickly turn into a bomb.
Explosives have an activation energy that’s measured in kJ/mol (energy per amount of atoms). Fire can exceed that activation energy if it burns hot enough and/or the explosives are in a container and can’t release the heat back out.
that’s pressure build up, that’s an issue with low explosive and completely irrelevant to high explosives, you will get the same result if you boil water in a sealed container.
High explosive do damage due to the shockwave created by the incredible speed of their combustion, low explosive need to be contained and build up pressure.
Think of a dust explosion in a flower mill, the flour particles are so fine they combust near instantaneously, creating a massive shockwave, even if the building has all it’s doors and windows open. High explosives are like that, they need an initiator explosion to turn them into dust and blow a flame through them to fast enough to cause the boom, otherwise it’s like setting fire to the wheat field, no where near as energetic.
It’s not irrelevant. if you put a sealed container in a fire the pressure inside will increase, the energy inside will increase, so the remaining energy required to be added for an explosion is going to be less.
So for example an incendiary round will not only have fire but will also increase the pressure at the point of impact with the filler. That energy has nowhere to go but out of the small hole the round entered through. if the energy out that hole isn’t fast enough then the point energy can exceed the activation energy triggering a chain reaction.
Gunpowder in a pile outside vs gunpowder in a container, very different results.
correct, but a HE round (like 20 or 30 mm) can be that explosion. Same with an AP round if it’s fast enough, at the point of impact there is A LOT of energy released that can trigger a chain reaction.
See the spark at the moment of impact:
( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRi0NTwbcOs )
All that energy condensed to a tiny point.
Here is a 20mm round hitting steel plates:
( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUWdH5NSRow )
Edit:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010218022002541
and gun power is a low explosive, not a high explosive, defined by the fact that it’s ignition when contained is different to when it is not… that is the entire point of separating high and low explosives, whether they need containment to generate pressure to detonate (low explosive) or if they simply burn so fast their mere act of combustion generates a shockwave.
yes, it can, but it has to detonate INSIDE the explosive INSIDE the bomb casing, Germany even developed the “schrage musik” cannons to do it,
but my point was never “It cannot happen” it is “it is FAR to common”
again, not impossible, but far from the current in game cases of .303 rounds detonating bombs,
in short, I think it should be a thing, but it should be a rare occurrence with high caliber ammunition, not like it is currently where a single .303 ball can chain kill an entire bomb load back to the bomber.
High vs low explosives is the difference if the speed at which the chemical reaction moves through the material is above or below the speed of sound. A contained low explosive will turn into a high explosive because that wave of reaction travels faster due to pressure buildup. Similarly a high explosive when contained will also detonate at a faster rate compared to uncontained due to the pressure buildup.
No it doesn’t, as long as the shockwave that travels through the filler is fast enough and at high pressure enough then the distance at which the initial explosion happened doesn’t matter, the shockwave will still trigger a detonation in the material.
I agree here. As i have from the beginning.
it will not be explosive if it is not contained, A high explosive will be explosive regardless as it’s combustion needs to be accelerated to supersonic to detonate it in the first place.
lol, yeah, that requires so much shockwave pressure that the compression heats the explosive well beyond flash point to ignition temperature, things are added into the explosives to to aid in this…
You know what, forget it, this is too hard of an argument to have when I cant actually talk about the details… It’s like trying to talk about boiling an egg but I can’t mention anything about a heat source, I’m stuck with “you put the egg in water and it gets cooked” I can’t talk about how you put it on a stove to heat it any more then I can go into the details of how you seed the high explosive compounds with “stuff” to act as incendiary initiators to spread the combustion as well as the shock wave.
Lets just leave it at bomb detonations should be a rare treat that happens with higher caliber ammo and leave it there, since that seems to be a point of agreement.
Which I wonder if its modeled.
Id get WW2 era shells being somewhat vulnerable to this, but I wonder if more modern bombs would be the same. Though hitting a B-52 with a redtop and creating a massive explosion is rather satisfying.
I do also wonder how many or even if any WW2 heavy bombers were destroyed because their bomb load exploded due to Flak or fighter fire. I dont think ive ever heard it happen IRL
You’re mixing up the terms. It’s not the initiation that needs to be super sonic for it to be classified as a high explosive. It’s the propagation of the chemical reaction that happens after initiation. A high explosive can be set of with VERY low temps or VERY low shock forces (e.g nitroglycerin) conversely a low explosive can be very stable and need lots of heat or lots of force to start deflagrating.
You can have a much stronger explosive but further away that results in the same shockwave pressure at point of contact with the filler as a weaker explosion does at a short distance. The pressure from an explosion decreases by one over the distance cubed (roughly). So if an explosion has a pressure wave of like 10 MPa at 1m it’s going to have a pressure wave of 1.25Mpa at 2m and a pressure wave of 0.37Mpa at 3m distance. This means that if you have an explosive that is 30 times more powerful then at 3m it will have the same pressure as the other one did at 1m.
Sorry - but this is theoretical nonsense:
Explosives in bombs are extremely phlegmatic - that means that they are unable to explode due to concussions and need specialized fuses to detonate - that’s why they are called secondary or tertiary explosives.
In oder to ignite any of these explosives you need to add energy - either by a fuse or things like heat or pressure above a certain threshold. In theory even a pure AP round can detonate a bomb as they produce heat whilst penetrating the bomb casing and transfer heat and motion energy when slowing down - this depends on the needed amount of “extra energy” to detonate the bomb.
So whilst it is technically not impossible that a HMG or cannon shell might be able to hit, penetrate AND to transfer the needed amount of energy to detonate the explosive filler, the probability of this happening irl is extremely low, but not impossible.
WT simply increases the chances to hit bombs AND to explode them to fantasy values as it is a video game.
Calibers below 35mil should not detonate bombs.
Gaijin modelled “bomb racks” on aircraft because they wanted to add mid air interception to bombs/rockets, seeing how it is common in modern conflict with CIWS systems and they didn’t want to make an exception on planes that haven’t dropped their bombs yet.
The problem of course is that like 90% of changes aimed towards high tiers, in ends up also affecting lower tiers.
And since this was aimed towards ground battles %100, air battles also had to get it.
Your gepard may still do the fancy “munition interception”, but try that on a M16 MGC and that bomb is flying straight towards your proximity.
This “feature” only beat down bombers even further.
If you want it still for “bomber balance”, maybe even add ammo racking belts on aircraft weaponry.
Yes, its the speed of combustion needs to accelerate to supersonic not the initiator strictly BE supersonic, but for what should be obvious reasons people use high explosives that are far more stable and do require not just supersonic detonators but multistage, when is the last time you heard of an artillery shell filled with nitro-glycerine?
yes, but its a MASSIVE increase, beyond the fact that the concussion needs to be enough to cause compression heating to beyond ignition temp. as you mentioned
Shockwave radius increases at the cube root of explosive mass, requiring half a stick of dynamite in the explosive mix to initiate will take 4 full sticks to detonate from 1 meter, 32 at 2 meters and 128 at 4 meters.
Yeah, this is the only change that they should explore.
Vary the probability of bomb detonation by round size and type. The bomb filler would also have quite an impact but I also imagine the capacity of the bomb would also change things quite a bit. Something like the 4000lb “cookie” on a Lancaster would probably be more vulnerable than a 1000lb MC bomb with a fairly thick bomb casing.
Though that does sound like a lot of modeling for something quite niche.
Honestly… I dont think it really changed anything. Heavy bombers still fall apart at the slightest breeze, their bomb loads being vulnerable just makes epic looking explosions, it didnt create any new weakspot that can be exploited, because the bomber probably would have died already
