Bullets made from nonstandard metals

So, I need a substance for bullets to be made out of that's highly conductive to electricity. Silver's the most conductive, of course, but I also hear it makes crappy bullets. Could tungsten bullets be mass-produced for an army? What other metals might work?

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

...Aren't bullets normally made of copper? That's only just below silver in terms of conductivity.

edited 3rd Aug '11 3:28:57 AM by Yej

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

Tungsten is actually a reasonably good choice as it's heavy and somewhat common. However, it's also pretty hard and would run the risk of damaging the barrel unless fired with a sabot. (Which shouldn't be impossible or even terribly hard even for personal-use firearms; I think plastic-saboted handgun rounds actually exist in some larger calibers.)

Copper is obvious for conductivity but I suspect it's too soft to be used pure for a complete round; could still use an alloy, maybe. Normally it's just used as a jacketing material because it grips the rifling good.

Nickel-iron alloy is the classic conductive material for use in fictional railgun and coilgun rounds, but might also be harder than you'd want to fire out of a conventional weapon without a sabot.

edited 3rd Aug '11 3:32:22 AM by Night

Nous restons ici.

Tungsten with a plastic (cheap and effective) sabot, lead is an acceptable conductor, actually, so standard copper jacketed lead bullets should do fine. Same with depleted uranium.

"This thread has gone so far south it's surrounded by nesting penguins. " — Madrugada

Depleted uranium is also good because, you know, it tears the fuck out of anything it hits. There's a reason the Army makes every other shell out of the stuff, along with the aforementioned tungsten. Really, you could just go all Ninja Pirate Robot Zombie and make a combination of heavy alloys (depleted uranium, tungsten) and the lighter stuff (copper). Asking for an electricity-conducting metal is going to get you a lot of options, believe it or not.

I am now known as Flyboy.

Depleted uranium is heavy, self-sharpening, and at the speeds of tank guns also incendiary when it makes contact with hard substances due to friction. Which is great for piercing heavy armor but rather useless for a personal firearm. You don't need the self-sharpening and you won't get the incendiary. At the point you're using DU for anything intended to be used on people, you're just showing off.

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Not true. It's also significantly denser than lead, so you're delivering more energy than a lead core bullet by using a DU core bullet. And the incendiary effect is NOT from friction, it's because uranium is pyrophoric when finely divided in air... such as after being (partially or wholly) shattered in an impact.

edited 3rd Aug '11 4:50:02 AM by Lessinath

"This thread has gone so far south it's surrounded by nesting penguins. " — Madrugada

Fair, but the incendiary still won't come into play on such a soft target. Tungsten and lead are easier and cheaper by far for an application that just isn't going to use most of the extra benefits of DU.

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They already are. Tungsten (and DU) core bullets have been around since the 1980s.

"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."

The increased density isn't a big enough benefit on its own? Oh really? Then why are they used so often for anti-personnel by the nations that have them.

edited 3rd Aug '11 9:59:11 AM by Lessinath

"This thread has gone so far south it's surrounded by nesting penguins. " — Madrugada

How heavy would that armor be for you to say DU is justified?

Also, would it be advantageous to have caseless DU rounds, or would there be issues similar to tungsten mentioned above?

edited 3rd Aug '11 10:09:02 AM by melloncollie

Caseless DU is too hard, still being among the hardest metals and certainly a hell of a lot harder than the steel guns are made of. Sure, you could fire it, but you won't have any rifling left in your barrel after one or two hundred rounds.

edited 3rd Aug '11 10:13:21 AM by Lessinath

"This thread has gone so far south it's surrounded by nesting penguins. " — Madrugada

This thread gives me an idea for the bullets used against the giants in my story.

Yes as in >10 foot tall humanoids.

If you are willing to break the Geneva convention, you can use exploding bullets.

"This thread has gone so far south it's surrounded by nesting penguins. " — Madrugada

There are no DU antipersonnel rounds, and certainly not for a personal weapon. They are used almost exclusively for high-end anti-armor stuff. I don't believe the US has a DU round smaller than 25mm still in service, or has ever had one smaller than 20mm. There were some non-cartridge applications for grenades and mines but they were pulled from service a decade ago.

20mm-30mm of steel or equivalent, probably. Possibly a little less.

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Solid DU, no, of course not. DU core, yes. They're not intended anti-personnel weapons, but they are relatively frequently used as such. No, we're not talking 20mm rounds, we're talking things as small as .50

It's been largely replaced with tungsten due to tungsten being a little denser, less prone to shattering (A big problem with DU projectiles), not leaving the area toxic after the battle is done like uranium and also, uranium has a bit of a boogeyman factor to it with the general public that tungsten doesn't have.

edited 3rd Aug '11 1:31:35 PM by Lessinath

"This thread has gone so far south it's surrounded by nesting penguins. " — Madrugada

Regular steel? What about weird alloys like tungsten or titanium steel?

You can't just say "X" bullet can penetrate "Y" armor, because of all the factors involved.

To name a few:

Range - with longer range the projectile has lower velocity. Angle - some types of anti-armor round don't work if they hit at an angle, also if you pierce armor at an angle you pass through a larger cross section. Is the armor spaced? If so, how many. Virtually no real-world armor is solid metal, spaces make it harder to pierce because the space disrupts the projectile. What is the armor made of (obviously)? If it's layered, that really screws with the terminal ballistics.

This can be insanely, mind-screw levels of complex. Or, ya know, you can just go off data from well-controlled laboratory conditions even though those never actually occur in the field.

Here's a video of bullets hitting various objects recorded at an obscenely high frame rate:

"This thread has gone so far south it's surrounded by nesting penguins. " — Madrugada

Thread Hop: silver can be used if you give it a standard jacket. Tungsten is already used, but it's in Tungsten Carbide form, which unless I missed something is a non-conductive ceramic (but I could be wrong).

Pure tungsten is a bitch to work with, and you're likely going to use a partial or full jacket. It really is going to depend on how you want the round to behave.

Stop by Depleted Phlebotinum Shells if you want more advice.

Fight smart, not fair.

Tungsten carbide is actually a surprisingly good conductor. Not as good as pure tungsten metal, however, it is still way, way better than, say, your standard plastics. It can conduct if you're willing to suffer some extra heat production and voltage drop.

edited 3rd Aug '11 8:24:39 PM by Lessinath

"This thread has gone so far south it's surrounded by nesting penguins. " — Madrugada

DU is also relatively impractical to obtain if there isn't already an entire uranium industry available based around nuclear weapons and power plants.

The stuff does have some roles in lines of work where radiation shielding is important (and uranium also has a few other obscure uses), but compare this to tungsten which has a vast range of common industrial uses.

Sorry, I don't buy it. Cite a source. Wikipedia and all other internet-based sources I can locate (and which don't appear to have an axe to grind) disagree with that assessment, as does my personal knowledge. I use "DU round" to refer to any round incorporating it.

Hence the "equivalent". Lessinath oversells it; you can work out an equivalency based on the various factors and I'm reasonably sure automated programs exist to do so. However since, again, I think we were talking in the context of a personal weapon I don't think you can make the various forces add up well enough to pierce armor that will cause the incendiary properties to manifest.

Nous restons ici.

Nope Uranium only rates about 6 on the mohs scale", it just happens to be cheap (if you refine Uranium industrially), easy to work with, and packs about 19 grams / cubic centimetre, which puts it in 7th place in the elemental density scale"".

" Regular steel is 4, hardened steel somewhere around 7.5-8, so you can use it, you just won't be using it more than a few hundred times before you need a new barrel.

"" Behind Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Plutonium, Gold and Tungsten.

edited 10th Aug '11 1:20:10 AM by MattII

Most rounds use two different metals: a hard jacket and a dense (but usually soft) core. Your standard military issue ball round will be copper jacketed with a lead core. You want the dense core to minimize the cross section at a given mass, which in turn increases penetration and reduces wind resistance. However, you want a hard jacket to penetrate the armour rather than going splat against it.

Steel is about eight times as dense as water, lead about 11 times, and uranium, tungsten, plutonium and gold are about 20 times, almost twice as dense as lead. Depending in the scale you use, copper and gold are about twice as hard as lead, steel is two to three times as hard as copper and tungsten carbide is even harder.

In terms of conductivity, silver is slightly better than copper, gold has time and a half the resistance of silver, tungsten about three times the resistance of copper, lead is about 4 times that of tungsten and stainless steel is about three times that of lead. Relative to other materials they are all good conductors; sea water is about a million times as resistant as the metals.

Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you are probably right.

With the right alloying and tempering, 18k gold can be made as hard as mild steel while remaining extremely dense and highly conductive. Expensive bullets.

Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you are probably right.