Shrapnel
Encyclopedia
Bullet
A bullet is a projectile propelled by a firearm, sling, or air gun. Bullets do not normally contain explosives, but damage the intended target by impact and penetration...
s close to the target and then ejected them to allow them to continue along the shell's trajectory and strike the target 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
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
for anti-personnel use, when it was superseded by high-explosive shells for that role. The functioning and principles behind Shrapnel shells are fundamentally different from high-explosive shell fragmentation. Shrapnel is named after Major-General Henry Shrapnel
Henry Shrapnel
Henry Shrapnel was a British Army officer and inventor, most famously, of the "shrapnel shell".Henry Shrapnel was born in Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire, England....
(1761–1842), an English
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
artillery
Artillery
Originally applied to any group of infantry primarily armed with projectile weapons, artillery has over time become limited in meaning to refer only to those engines of war that operate by projection of munitions far beyond the range of effect of personal weapons...
officer, whose experiment
Experiment
An experiment is a methodical procedure carried out with the goal of verifying, falsifying, or establishing the validity of a hypothesis. Experiments vary greatly in their goal and scale, but always rely on repeatable procedure and logical analysis of the results...
s, initially conducted in his own time and at his own expense, culminated in the design
Design
Design as a noun informally refers to a plan or convention for the construction of an object or a system while “to design” refers to making this plan...
and development of a new type of artillery shell.
Development of shrapnel shell
Royal Artillery
The Royal Regiment of Artillery, commonly referred to as the Royal Artillery , is the artillery arm of the British Army. Despite its name, it comprises a number of regiments.-History:...
began developing an anti-personnel weapon
Anti-personnel weapon
An anti-personnel weapon is one primarily used to incapacitate people, as opposed to attacking structures or vehicles.The development of defensive fortification and combat vehicles gave rise to weapons designed specifically to attack them, and thus a need to distinguish between those systems and...
. At the time artillery could use "canister shot
Canister shot
Canister shot is a kind of anti-personnel ammunition used in cannons. It was similar to the naval grapeshot, but fired smaller and more numerous balls, which did not have to punch through the wooden hull of a ship...
" to defend themselves from infantry
Infantry
Infantrymen are soldiers who are specifically trained for the role of fighting on foot to engage the enemy face to face and have historically borne the brunt of the casualties of combat in wars. As the oldest branch of combat arms, they are the backbone of armies...
or cavalry
Cavalry
Cavalry or horsemen were soldiers or warriors who fought mounted on horseback. Cavalry were historically the third oldest and the most mobile of the combat arms...
attack, which involved loading a tin or canvas container filled with small iron or lead balls instead of the usual cannonball
Round shot
Round shot is a solid projectile without explosive charge, fired from a cannon. As the name implies, round shot is spherical; its diameter is slightly less than the bore of the gun it is fired from.Round shot was made in early times from dressed stone, but by the 17th century, from iron...
. When fired, the container burst open during passage through the bore or at the muzzle, giving the effect of an over-sized shotgun shell
Shotgun shell
A shotgun shell is a self-contained cartridge loaded with lead shot or shotgun slug designed to be fired from a shotgun....
. At ranges of up to 300 m canister shot was still highly lethal, though at this range the shots’ density was much lower, making a hit on a human target less likely. At longer ranges, solid shot or the common shell — a hollow cast iron sphere filled with black powder
Gunpowder
Gunpowder, also known since in the late 19th century as black powder, was the first chemical explosive and the only one known until the mid 1800s. It is a mixture of sulfur, charcoal, and potassium nitrate - with the sulfur and charcoal acting as fuels, while the saltpeter works as an oxidizer...
— was used, although with more of a concussive than a fragmentation effect, as the pieces of the shell were very large and sparse in number.
Shrapnel's innovation was to combine the multi-projectile shotgun effect of canister shot, with a time fuze to open the canister and disperse the bullets it contained at some distance along the canister's trajectory from the gun. His shell was a hollow cast-iron sphere filled with a mixture of balls and powder, with a crude time fuse. If the fuse was set correctly then the shell would break open, either in front or above the intended target, releasing its contents (of musket
Musket
A musket is a muzzle-loaded, smooth bore long gun, fired from the shoulder. Muskets were designed for use by infantry. A soldier armed with a musket had the designation musketman or musketeer....
balls). The shrapnel balls would carry on with the "remaining velocity" of the shell. In addition to a denser pattern of musket balls, the retained velocity could be higher as well, since the shrapnel shell as a whole would likely have a higher ballistic coefficient
Ballistic coefficient
In ballistics, the ballistic coefficient of a body is a measure of its ability to overcome air resistance in flight. It is inversely proportional to the negative acceleration—a high number indicates a low negative acceleration. BC is a function of mass, diameter, and drag coefficient...
than the individual musket balls (see external ballistics
External ballistics
External ballistics is the part of the science of ballistics that deals with the behaviour of a non-powered projectile in flight. External ballistics is frequently associated with firearms, and deals with the behaviour of the bullet after it exits the barrel and before it hits the target.-Forces...
).
The explosive charge in the shell was to be just enough to break the casing rather than scatter the shot in all directions. As such his invention increased the effective range of canister shot from 300 to about 1100 m.
He called his device 'spherical case shot', but in time it came to be called after him; a position formalised in 1852 by the British Government.
Initial designs suffered from the potentially catastrophic problem that friction between the shot and black powder during the high acceleration down the gun bore could sometimes cause premature ignition of the powder. Various solutions were tried, with limited if any success. However, in 1852 Colonel Boxer proposed using a diaphragm to separate the bullets from the bursting charge, this proved successful and was adopted the following year. As a buffer to prevent lead shot deforming, a resin was used as a packing material between the shot. A useful side effect of using the resin was that the combustion also gave a visual reference upon the shell bursting, as the resin shattered into a cloud of dust.
British artillery adoption
Henry Shrapnel
Henry Shrapnel was a British Army officer and inventor, most famously, of the "shrapnel shell".Henry Shrapnel was born in Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire, England....
was promoted to Major
Major
Major is a rank of commissioned officer, with corresponding ranks existing in almost every military in the world.When used unhyphenated, in conjunction with no other indicator of rank, the term refers to the rank just senior to that of an Army captain and just below the rank of lieutenant colonel. ...
in the same year. The first recorded use of shrapnel by the British was in 1804 against the Dutch at Fort Amsterdam in Surinam. The Duke of Wellington
Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington
Field Marshal Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, KG, GCB, GCH, PC, FRS , was an Irish-born British soldier and statesman, and one of the leading military and political figures of the 19th century...
's armies used it from 1808 in the Peninsular War
Peninsular War
The Peninsular War was a war between France and the allied powers of Spain, the United Kingdom, and Portugal for control of the Iberian Peninsula during the Napoleonic Wars. The war began when French and Spanish armies crossed Spain and invaded Portugal in 1807. Then, in 1808, France turned on its...
and at the Battle of Waterloo
Battle of Waterloo
The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday 18 June 1815 near Waterloo in present-day Belgium, then part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands...
, and he wrote admiringly of its effectiveness.
The design was improved by Captain E M Boxer
Edward Boxer
Edward Boxer was an English Royal Navy officer, who reached the rank of rear-admiral.-Life:Boxer entered the navy in 1798. After eight years' junior service, mostly with Captain Charles Brisbane, and for some short time in the Ocean, Lord Collingwood's flagship, he was confirmed, 8 June 1807, as...
RA in the 1840-1850s and crossed over when cylindrical shells for rifled guns were introduced. Lieutenant-Colonel Boxer adapted his design in 1864 to produce shrapnel shells for the new rifled muzzle-loader (RML) guns : the walls were of thick cast iron
Cast iron
Cast iron is derived from pig iron, and while it usually refers to gray iron, it also identifies a large group of ferrous alloys which solidify with a eutectic. The color of a fractured surface can be used to identify an alloy. White cast iron is named after its white surface when fractured, due...
, but the gunpowder charge was now in the shell base with a tube running through the centre of the shell to convey the ignition flash from the time fuze in the nose to the gunpowder charge in the base. The powder charge both shattered the cast iron shell wall and liberated the bullets. The broken shell wall continued mainly forward but had little destructive effect. The system had major limitations: the thickness of the iron shell walls limited the available carrying capacity for bullets but provided little destructive capability, and the tube through the centre similarly reduced available space for bullets.
In the 1870s William Armstrong
William George Armstrong, 1st Baron Armstrong
William George Armstrong, 1st Baron Armstrong CB, FRS was an effective Tyneside industrialist who founded the Armstrong Whitworth manufacturing empire.-Early life:...
provided a design with the bursting charge in the head and the shell wall made of steel and hence much thinner than previous cast-iron shrapnel shell walls. While the thinner shell wall and absence of a central tube allowed the shell to carry far more bullets, it had the disadvantage that the bursting charge separated the bullets from the shell casing by firing the case forward and at the same time slowing the bullets down as they were ejected through the base of the shell casing, rather than increasing their velocity. Britain adopted this solution for several smaller calibres (below 6-inch) but by World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
few if any such shells remained.
The final shrapnel shell design, adopted in the 1880s, bore little similarity to Henry Shrapnel's original design other than its spherical bullets and time fuze. It used a much thinner forged steel shell case with a timer fuze in the nose and a tube running through the centre to convey the ignition flash to a gunpowder bursting charge in the shell base. The use of steel allowed the shell wall to be made much thinner and hence allow space for many more bullets. It also withstood the force of the powder charge without shattering, so that the bullets were fired forward out of the shell case with increased velocity, much like a shotgun. This is the design that came to be adopted by all countries and was in standard use when World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
began in 1914. During the 1880s, when both the old cast-iron and modern forged-steel shrapnel shell designs were in British service, British ordnance manuals referred to the older cast-iron design as "Boxer shrapnel", apparently to differentiate it from the modern steel design.
The modern thin-walled forged-steel design made feasible shrapnel shells for howitzers, which had a much lower velocity than field guns, by using a larger gunpowder charge to accelerate the bullets forward on bursting. The ideal shrapnel design would have had a timer fuze in the shell base to avoid the need for a central tube, but this was not technically feasible due to the need to manually adjust the fuze before firing, and was in any case rejected from an early date by the British due to risk of premature ignition and irregular action.
World War I era
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Technical considerations
The size of shrapnel balls in World War I was based on two considerations. One was the premise that a projectile energy of 58 foot-pounds (78.6 J) (US Army calculation) to 60 foot-pounds (81.3 J) (British calculation) was required to disable an enemy soldier. At the velocity of a typical World War I 3 inches (76.2 mm) field gun shell after travelling 6000 yards (5,486.4 m), plus the additional velocity from the shrapnel bursting charge (about 150 – 200 feet per second), giving a terminal velocity of 400 feet per second, this was the minimum energy of a single half-inch lead-antimony ball of approximately 170 gr, or 41-42 balls = 1 pound. Hence this was a typical field gun shrapnel bullet size. For larger guns which had lower velocities, correspondingly larger balls were used so that each individual ball carried enough energy to be lethal.
The important points to note about shrapnel shells and bullets in their final stage of development in World War I are :
- They used the property of carrying power, whereby if two projectiles are fired with the same velocity, then the heavier one goes further. Bullets packed into a heavier carrier shell went further than they would individually.
- The shell body itself was not lethal : its sole function was to transport the bullets close to the target, and it fell to the ground intact after the bullets were released. A battlefield where a shrapnel barrage had been fired was afterwards typically littered with intact empty shell bodies, fuzes and central tubes. Troops under a shrapnel barrage would attempt to convey any of these intact fuzes they found to their own artillery units, as the time setting on the fuze could be used to calculate the shell's range and hence identify the firing gun's position, allowing it to be targeted in a counter-barrage.
- They depended almost entirely on the shell's velocity for their lethality : there was no lateral explosive effect.
A firsthand description of successful British deployment of shrapnel in a defensive barrage during the Third Battle of Ypres, 1917 :
"... the air is full of yellow spurts of smoke that burst about 30 feet up and shoot towards the earth - just ahead of each of these yellow puffs the earth rises in a lashed-up cloud - shrapnel - and how beautifully placed - long sweeps of it fly along that slope lashing up a good 200 yards of earth at each burst".
Tactical use
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, shrapnel was widely used by all sides as an anti-personnel weapon. It was the only type of shell available for British field guns (13-pounder and 18-pounder). Shrapnel was effective against troops in the open, particularly massed infantry (advancing or withdrawing). However, the onset of trench warfare
Trench warfare
Trench warfare is a form of occupied fighting lines, consisting largely of trenches, in which troops are largely immune to the enemy's small arms fire and are substantially sheltered from artillery...
from late 1914 led to most armies decreasing their use of shrapnel in favour of high-explosive. Britain continued to use a high percentage of shrapnel shells. New tactical roles included cutting barbed wire and providing "creeping barrages" to both screen its own attacking troops and suppressing the enemy defenders to prevent them from shooting at their attackers.
In a creeping barrage fire was 'lifted' from one 'line' to the next as the attackers advanced. These lines were typically 100 yds apart and the lifts were typically 4 minutes apart. Lifting meant that time fuzes settings had to be changed. The attackers tried to keep as close as possible (as little as 25 yards sometimes) to the bursting shrapnel so as to be on top of the enemy trenches when fire lifted beyond them, and before the enemy could get back to their parapets.
Advantages
While shrapnel made no impression on trenches and other earthworks, it remained the favored weapon of the British (at least) to support their infantry assaults by suppressing the enemy infantry and preventing them from manning their trench parapets. It was less hazardous to the assaulting British infantry than high explosives - as long as their own shrapnel burst above or ahead of them, attackers were safe from its effects, whereas high-explosive shells bursting short are potentially lethal within 100 yards or more in any direction. Shrapnel being non-cratering was advantageous in an assault, as craters made the ground more difficult to cross, although they also provided firing positions for infantry. Shrapnel was also useful against counter-attacks, working parties and any other troops in the open.Shrapnel provided a useful "screening" effect from the smoke of the black-powder bursting charge when the British used it in "creeping barrages".
Disadvantages
Shrapnel was only effective in cutting the barbed wireBarbed wire
Barbed wire, also known as barb wire , is a type of fencing wire constructed with sharp edges or points arranged at intervals along the strand. It is used to construct inexpensive fences and is used atop walls surrounding secured property...
entanglements in no man's land
No man's land
No man's land is a term for land that is unoccupied or is under dispute between parties that leave it unoccupied due to fear or uncertainty. The term was originally used to define a contested territory or a dumping ground for refuse between fiefdoms...
if the conditions were correct: the angle of descent had to be flat to maximise the number of bullets going through the entanglements, and this limited the effective range. Bullets had limited destructive effect and were stopped by sandbags, so troops behind protection or in bunkers were generally safe. Also steel helmets, both the German Stahlhelm
Stahlhelm
Stahlhelm is German for "steel helmet". The Imperial German Army began to replace the traditional boiled-leather Pickelhaube with the Stahlhelm during World War I in 1916...
and the British Brodie helmet
Brodie helmet
The Brodie helmet, called Helmet, steel, Mark I helmet in Britain and the M1917 Helmet in the U.S., was a steel combat helmet designed and patented in 1915 by the Briton John Leopold Brodie...
, could resist Shrapnel bullets and protect the wearer from head injury.
A shrapnel shell was more expensive than a high-explosive one and required higher grade steel for the shell body. They were also harder to use correctly because getting the correct fuze running time was critical in order to burst the shell in the right place. This required considerable skill by the observation officer when engaging moving targets.
An added complication was that the actual fuze running time was affected by the meteorological conditions, with the variation in gun muzzle velocity being an added complication. However, the British used fuze indicators at each gun that determined the correct fuze running time (length) corrected for muzzle velocity.
Replacement by high-explosive shell
With the advent of relatively insensitive high explosives which could be used as the filling for shells, it was found that the casing of a properly designed high explosive shell fragmented effectively. For example, the detonation of an average 105 mm shell produces several thousand high velocity (1,000 to 1,500 m/s) fragments, a lethal (at very close range) blast overpressure and, if a surface or sub-surface burst, a useful cratering and anti-materiel effect — all in a munition much less complex than the later versions of the shrapnel shell. However, this fragmentation was often lost when shells penetrated soft ground and because some fragments went in all directions it was a hazard to assaulting troops.Variations
One item of note is the 'Universal Shell', a type of field gun shell developed by KruppKrupp
The Krupp family , a prominent 400-year-old German dynasty from Essen, have become famous for their steel production and for their manufacture of ammunition and armaments. The family business, known as Friedrich Krupp AG Hoesch-Krupp, was the largest company in Europe at the beginning of the 20th...
of Germany in the early 1900s. This shell could function as either a shrapnel shell or high explosive projectile. The shell had a modified fuze, and instead of resin as the packing between the shrapnel balls TNT was used. When a timed fuze was set the shell functioned as a shrapnel round, ejecting the balls and igniting (not detonating) the TNT, giving a visible puff of black smoke. When allowed to impact the TNT filling would detonate, so becoming a high explosive shell with a very large amount of low velocity fragmentation and a milder blast. Due to its complexity it was dropped in favour of the simple high explosive shell.
During World War I the UK also used shrapnel pattern shells to carry 'pots' instead of 'bullets'. These were incendiary shells with 7 pots using a thermite
Thermite
Thermite is a pyrotechnic composition of a metal powder and a metal oxide that produces an exothermic oxidation-reduction reaction known as a thermite reaction. If aluminium is the reducing agent it is called an aluminothermic reaction...
compound.
When World War I began the United States also had what it referred to as the "Ehrhardt High-Explosive Shrapnel" in its inventory. It appears to be similar to the German design, with bullets embedded in TNT rather than resin, together with a quantity of explosive in the shell nose. Douglas Hamilton mentions this shell type in passing, as "not as common as other types" in his comprehensive treatises on manufacturing Shrapnel and High Explosive shells of 1915 and 1916, but gives no manufacturing details. Nor does Ethan Viall in 1917. Hence the US appears to have ceased its manufacture early in the war, presumably based on the experience of other combatants.
World War II era
A new British streamlined shrapnel shell, Mk 3D, had been developed for BL 60 pounder gun in the early 1930s, containing 760 bullets. There was some use of shrapnel by the British in the campaigns in East and North East Africa at the beginning of the war, where 18-pdr and 4.5-in (114 mm) howitzers were used. By World War IIWorld War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
shrapnel shells, in the strict sense of the word, fell out of use, the last recorded use of shrapnel being 60 pdr shells fired in Burma
Burma Campaign
The Burma Campaign in the South-East Asian Theatre of World War II was fought primarily between British Commonwealth, Chinese and United States forces against the forces of the Empire of Japan, Thailand, and the Indian National Army. British Commonwealth land forces were drawn primarily from...
in 1943. In 1945 the British conducted successful trials with shrapnel shells fuzed with VT
Proximity fuze
A proximity fuze is a fuze that is designed to detonate an explosive device automatically when the distance to target becomes smaller than a predetermined value or when the target passes through a given plane...
. However, shrapnel was not developed for any of the post World War I guns.
Vietnam War era
Although not strictly shrapnel, a 1960s weapons project produced splintex shells for 90 and 106 mm recoilless rifles and 105 mm HowitzerHowitzer
A howitzer is a type of artillery piece characterized by a relatively short barrel and the use of comparatively small propellant charges to propel projectiles at relatively high trajectories, with a steep angle of descent...
s where it was called a 'Beehive'
Beehive (ammunition)
Beehive is an anti-personnel round fired from an artillery gun. The round is packed with metal flechettes which are ejected from the shell during flight by a mechanical time fuze. It is so called because of the 'buzzing' sound the darts make when flying through the air...
round. Unlike the shrapnel shells’ balls, the splintex shell contained flechette
Flechette
A flechette is a pointed steel projectile, with a vaned tail for stable flight. The name comes from French , "little arrow" or "dart", and sometimes retains the acute accent in English: fléchette.-Bulk and artillery use:...
s. The result was the 105 mm M546 APERS-T (Anti-PERSonnel-Tracer) round, first used in the Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
in 1966. The shell consisted of approximately 8,000 one-half gram flechettes arranged in five tiers, a time fuse, body shearing detonators, a central flash tube, a smokeless propellant charge with a dye marker contained in the base and a tracer element. The functioning of the shell was as follows: the time fuse fires, the flash travels down the flash tube, the shearing detonators fire, and the forward body splits into four pieces. The body and first four tiers are dispersed by the projectile's spin, the last tier and visual marker by the powder charge itself. The flechettes spread, mainly due to spin, from the point of burst in an ever widening cone along the projectile's previous trajectory prior to bursting. The round is complex to make, but is a highly effective anti-personnel weapon — soldiers report that after beehive rounds were fired during an over-run attack, many enemy dead had their hands nailed to the wooden stocks of their rifles, and these dead could be dragged to mass graves by the rifle. It is said that the name beehive was given to the munition type due to the noise of the flechettes moving through the air resembling that of a swarm of angry bees.
Modern era
Though shrapnel rounds are now rarely used, apart from the beehive munitionsBeehive (ammunition)
Beehive is an anti-personnel round fired from an artillery gun. The round is packed with metal flechettes which are ejected from the shell during flight by a mechanical time fuze. It is so called because of the 'buzzing' sound the darts make when flying through the air...
, there are other modern rounds, that use, or have used the shrapnel principle. The DM 111 20 mm cannon round used for close range air defense, the flechette filled 40 mm HVCC (40 x 53 mm HV grenade), the 35 mm cannon (35 × 228 mm) AHEAD ammunition (152 x 3.3 g tungsten cylinders), RWM Schweiz 30 × 173 mm Air-Bursting munition, 5-Inch Shotgun Projectile (KE-ET) and possibly many more. Also many modern armies have canister shot ammunition for tank and artillery guns, the XM1028 round for the 120 mm M256 tank gun being one example (approx 1150 tungsten balls at 1400 m/s).
At least some anti-ballistic missile
Anti-ballistic missile
An anti-ballistic missile is a missile designed to counter ballistic missiles .A ballistic missile is used to deliver nuclear, chemical, biological or conventional warheads in a ballistic flight trajectory. The term "anti-ballistic missile" describes any antimissile system designed to counter...
s (ABMs) use shrapnel-like warhead instead of the more common blast/fragmentation (blast/frag) type. As with a blast/frag warhead, the use of this type of warhead does not require a direct body-on-body impact, so greatly reducing tracking and steering accuracy requirements. At a predetermined distance from the incoming re-entry vehicle (RV) the warhead releases, in the case of the ABM warhead by an explosive expulsion charge, an array of mainly rod-like sub-projectiles into the RV's flight path. Unlike a blast/frag warhead, the expulsion charge is only needed to release the sub-projectiles from the main warhead, not to accelerate them to high velocity. The velocity required to penetrate the RV's casing comes from the high terminal velocity of the warhead, similar to the shrapnel shell's principle. The reason for the use of this type of warhead and not a blast/frag is that the fragments produced by a blast/frag warhead cannot guarantee penetration of the RV's casing. By using rod like sub-projectiles, a much greater thickness of material can be penetrated, greatly increasing the potential for disruption of the incoming RV.
The Starstreak missile
Starstreak missile
Starstreak is a British short range surface-to-air missile manufactured by Thales Air Defence , in Belfast. It is also known as Starstreak HVM where HVM stands for "High Velocity Missile". After launch the missile accelerates to approximately Mach 3.5, at which point it launches three laser beam...
uses a similar system, with three metal darts splitting from the missile prior to impact.
See also
- WarWarWar is a state of organized, armed, and often prolonged conflict carried on between states, nations, or other parties typified by extreme aggression, social disruption, and usually high mortality. War should be understood as an actual, intentional and widespread armed conflict between political...
fare: Artillery shellShell (projectile)A shell is a payload-carrying projectile, which, as opposed to shot, contains an explosive or other filling, though modern usage sometimes includes large solid projectiles properly termed shot . Solid shot may contain a pyrotechnic compound if a tracer or spotting charge is used...
, Anti-personnel weaponAnti-personnel weaponAn anti-personnel weapon is one primarily used to incapacitate people, as opposed to attacking structures or vehicles.The development of defensive fortification and combat vehicles gave rise to weapons designed specifically to attack them, and thus a need to distinguish between those systems and...
, Claymore mine - People: Henry ShrapnelHenry ShrapnelHenry Shrapnel was a British Army officer and inventor, most famously, of the "shrapnel shell".Henry Shrapnel was born in Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire, England....
, Thomas Pakenham, 5th Earl of LongfordThomas Pakenham, 5th Earl of LongfordThomas Pakenham, 5th Earl of Longford KP, MVO , known as Lord Silchester until 1887, was an Irish peer and soldier....
, Wali Khan Amin ShahWali Khan Amin ShahWali Khan Amin Shah was a man who had a role in the foiled Bojinka plot. He was convicted of terrorism, and has been imprisoned on these charges since 1995.... - GrapeshotGrapeshotIn artillery, a grapeshot is a type of shot that is not a one solid element, but a mass of small metal balls or slugs packed tightly into a canvas bag. It was used both in land and naval warfare. When assembled, the balls resembled a cluster of grapes, hence the name...
, a shorter-range predecessor of Shrapnel shells.
External links
- Douglas T Hamilton, Shrapnel Shell Manufacture. A Comprehensive Treatise. New York: Industrial Press, 1915
- Various authors, "Shrapnel and other war material" : Reprint of articles in American Machinist New York : McGraw-Hill, 1915