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A continuous-rod warhead is a specialized munition exhibiting an annular blast fragmentation pattern, thus when exploding it spreads into a large circle cutting through the target. It is used in anti-aircraft and anti-missile missiles.
Rifle and machine-gun bullets were used against early military aircraft during World War I. Artillery was used when aircraft flew above the range of rifle and machine-gun cartridges. Since the probability of actually striking the aircraft was small, artillery shells were designed to explode at the approximate altitude of the aircraft to throw a shower of fragments in the vicinity of the explosion. Similar anti-aircraft weaponry with larger calibers, higher rates of fire, and improved fuzes continued to be used through World War II. These bullets and small fragments often made small holes in the airframe. Unless a bullet or fragment struck the pilot, or some critical part of the airframe, (like a fuel line, part of the engine coolant system, a critical wire or hydraulic line actuating control surfaces), the aircraft remained operational. Some anti-aircraft artillery projectiles were designed to fragment into long, thin pieces in an attempt to inflict damage on the airframe. Holes made by such fragments were more likely to cause destructive disruption of airflow around high-speed aircraft, but the hit probability was lowered for the smaller number of fragments from a warhead of equal size.
The problem became more significant as anti-aircraft missiles were developed to replace guns after World War II: A smaller number of missiles would require an improved warhead to match the aircraft destruction probability of the larger number of artillery projectiles potentially carried by a weapon of the same size and cost.
The concept of a folded continuous rod warhead was suggested in 1952. The Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University invented the Continuous Expanding Rod Warhead as part of its Navy-contracted development of the U. S. Navy's anti-air missile defense program. The details of the warhead were Top Secret until its use was no longer needed. [1]
An even number of individual steel rods are arranged in parallel to form a cylinder. The ends of the rods are welded together—the first rod and the second rod are welded together at the top, the second and third at the bottom, and so on all the way around the form.
When detonated, the high explosive imparts momentum to the rods, thrusting them outward in an expanding circle. The pressure wave from the explosive needs to act evenly on the rods over their length, so some sort of tamper is used to shape the shock wave similar to an explosive lens. The rods are sufficiently soft (ductile) to allow the expansion without breaking the rods or the welded joints, and the detonation velocity is limited to under 1,150 m/s, [2] allowing the rods to bend at these locations instead. At some intermediate point the ring will have a zig-zag (alternating direction) appearance within a cylindrical envelope. Upon ultimate expansion the ring is circular and contained within a plane. The ring will then break and ultimately tend to form one or more straight rods. Since the net momentum of the rod relative to the missile is roughly zero, its effectiveness will rapidly diminish as the broken ring expands. [3]
This rapidly expanding ring, when hitting the aircraft, can be more effective than an equivalent fragmentation warhead: the ring of rods provides a larger surface area than a fragmented ballistic. [2] Portions of the aircraft intercepted by the expanding ring of the continuous rod warhead will receive a continuous cut through the skin, flight or aerodynamic surfaces, underlying cables, hydraulic lines, and other flight or mission-critical structures. This may cause a structural failure, or, if not, can be sufficient for defeating the redundancy of aircraft systems. The effect is only pronounced as long as the ring is unbroken, so multiple layers of rods are employed in practical weapons to increase the effective radius.
When designing the ill-fated SAM-equipped Mauler, Monte Carlo simulations on the then-state-of-the-art IBM 650 indicated that a continuous-rod warhead was likely to be less effective than blast fragmentation types. [4] Subsequent implementations indicated the opposite.
A missile is an airborne ranged weapon capable of self-propelled flight aided usually by a propellant, jet engine or rocket motor.
A warhead is the section of a device that contains the explosive agent or toxic material that is delivered by a missile, rocket, torpedo, or bomb.
Shrapnel shells were anti-personnel artillery munitions which carried many individual bullets close to a target area and then ejected them to allow them to continue along the shell's trajectory and strike targets individually. They relied almost entirely on the shell's velocity for their lethality. The munition has been obsolete since the end of World War I for anti-personnel use; high-explosive shells superseded it for that role. The functioning and principles behind shrapnel shells are fundamentally different from high-explosive shell fragmentation. Shrapnel is named after Lieutenant-General Henry Shrapnel (1761–1842), a British artillery officer, whose experiments, initially conducted on his own time and at his own expense, culminated in the design and development of a new type of artillery shell.
A shaped charge is an explosive charge shaped to focus the effect of the explosive's energy. Different types of shaped charges are used for various purposes such as cutting and forming metal, initiating nuclear weapons, penetrating armor, or perforating wells in the oil and gas industry.
Armour-piercing ammunition (AP) is a type of projectile designed to penetrate armour protection, most often including naval armour, body armour, and vehicle armour.
Terminal ballistics is a sub-field of ballistics concerned with the behavior and effects of a projectile when it hits and transfers its energy to a target.
High-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) is the effect of a shaped charge explosive that uses the Munroe effect to penetrate heavy armor. The warhead functions by having an explosive charge collapse a metal liner inside the warhead into a high-velocity shaped charge jet; this is capable of penetrating armor steel to a depth of seven or more times the diameter of the charge. The shaped charge jet armor penetration effect is purely kinetic in nature; the round has no explosive or incendiary effect on the armor.
A shell, in a military context, is a projectile whose payload contains an explosive, incendiary, or other chemical filling. Originally it was called a bombshell, but "shell" has come to be unambiguous in a military context. A shell can hold a tracer.
A tandem-charge or dual-charge weapon is an explosive device or projectile that has two or more stages of detonation, assisting it to penetrate either reactive armour on an armoured vehicle or strong structures.
Military vehicles are commonly armoured to withstand the impact of shrapnel, bullets, shells, rockets, and missiles, protecting the personnel inside from enemy fire. Such vehicles include armoured fighting vehicles like tanks, aircraft, and ships.
The MIM-72A/M48 Chaparral is an American-made self-propelled surface-to-air missile system based on the AIM-9 Sidewinder air-to-air missile system. The launcher is based on the M113 family of vehicles. It entered service with the United States Army in 1969 and was phased out between 1990 and 1998. It was intended to be used along with the M163 VADS, the Vulcan ADS covering short-range short-time engagements, and the Chaparral for longer range use.
Gun-type fission weapons are fission-based nuclear weapons whose design assembles their fissile material into a supercritical mass by the use of the "gun" method: shooting one piece of sub-critical material into another. Although this is sometimes pictured as two sub-critical hemispheres driven together to make a supercritical sphere, typically a hollow projectile is shot onto a spike, which fills the hole in its center. Its name is a reference to the fact that it is shooting the material through an artillery barrel as if it were a projectile.
An explosively formed penetrator (EFP), also known as an explosively formed projectile, a self-forging warhead, or a self-forging fragment, is a special type of shaped charge designed to penetrate armor effectively, from a much greater standoff range than standard shaped charges, which are more limited by standoff distance. As the name suggests, the effect of the explosive charge is to deform a metal plate into a slug or rod shape and accelerate it toward a target. They were first developed as oil well perforators by American oil companies in the 1930s, and were deployed as weapons in World War II.
The Kortik close-in weapon system (CIWS) is a modern naval air defence gun-missile system deployed by the Russian Navy. Its export version is known as Kashtan, with the NATO designation CADS-N-1 Kashtan.
Fragmentation is the process by which the casing, shot, or other components of an anti-personnel weapon, bomb, barrel bomb, land mine, IED, artillery, mortar, tank gun, or autocannon shell, rocket, missile, grenade, etc. are dispersed and/or shattered by the detonation of the explosive filler.
A kinetic energy weapon is a projectile weapon based solely on a projectile's kinetic energy to inflict damage to a target, instead of using any explosive, incendiary/thermal, chemical or radiological payload. All kinetic weapons work by attaining a high flight speed — generally supersonic or even up to hypervelocity — and collide with their targets, converting its kinetic energy and relative impulse into destructive shock waves, heat and cavitation. In kinetic weapons with unpowered flight, the muzzle velocity or launch velocity often determines the effective range and potential damage of the kinetic projectile.
Ammunition is the material fired, scattered, dropped, or detonated from any weapon or weapon system. Ammunition is both expendable weapons and the component parts of other weapons that create the effect on a target.
The General Dynamics Mauler was a self-propelled anti-aircraft missile system designed to a late 1950s US Army requirement for a system to combat low-flying high-performance tactical fighters and short-range ballistic missiles.
In military munitions, a fuze is the part of the device that initiates its function. In some applications, such as torpedoes, a fuze may be identified by function as the exploder. The relative complexity of even the earliest fuze designs can be seen in cutaway diagrams.
Beyond-armour effect is a term coined by Försvarets Fabriksverk (FFV), a semi-governmental Swedish defense firm, while developing the AT4. From the 1980s this phrase was used in its brochures, press releases, weapon instruction manuals and other documentation to denote the post-penetration effect of the AT4's HEAT anti-armour warhead against the interior and occupants of armoured vehicles.