2 ms·
Yes, the author is confused. This factory produces black-powder, which is a mixture of charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter. All modern ammunition uses smokeless p
by fwlr 3y ago
Yes, the author is confused.
This factory produces black-powder, which is a mixture of charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter.
All modern ammunition uses smokeless powder, which is stabilized nitrocellulose and nitroglycerin.
(This confusion likely is due to the term gunpowder, which when used as a technical term only refers to black-powder. Unfortunately it is also used colloquially to mean any kind of explosive powder put into cartridges that are detonated to launch projectiles from guns. In this sense of gunpowder, almost all of it is smokeless powder, and thus its colloquial meaning is almost completely at odds with its technical meaning.)
To my knowledge, the US military does not rely on blackpowder in any meaningful way. Even if my knowledge is incomplete and they do depend on it in some odd way (e.g. I suppose they might have a pre-existing inventory of weapons designed to use black powder primers, where it is cheaper to keep sourcing black powder rather than retrofit the weapons to use smokeless powder primers) there are several corporations manufacturing large quantities of 1:1 black powder substitutes.
- Chrontius 3y agoBlack powder is used in booster charges. In artillery fuzes, there can be up to four different types of explosive in the explosive train which ignites the main charge, according to my half-assed Googling and Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosive_train https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosive_train In addition, black powder in particular is used in recoilless rifles, perhaps the most famous example being the RPG-7. http://previewcf.turbosquid.com/Preview/2016/01/31__04_23_48/main_preview.jpgfb011b2d-4197-444c-b6bc-c9e0b042a353Original.jpg http://previewcf.turbosquid.com/Preview/2016/01/31__04_23_48... In this image, the olive-drab component is the warhead-and-rocket assembly, and the forest-green component is a full fucking pound of black powder which launches the rocket to a minimum safe range before the ignition of the main propulsion motor. I'm presently unsure about the propellants used in other recoilless systems, but I can presume that there exist designs other than the RPG-7 which are currently being provided in bulk to Ukraine, while simultaneously utilizing some amount of black powder in the propulsion system, while some further subset of those will prove difficult to redesign to use more modern double- or triple-base smokeless propellants due to the much higher operating pressure of these propellants, especially in the context of thin-walled light-weight launchers.
- fwlr 3y agoYes, I suspected that if there were dependencies on black-powder, it was because it was being used in older weapons systems and those were being supplied to Ukraine. There are plenty of black-powder substitutes that are carefully designed to match various characteristics of standard black-powder, including 1:1 volumetric substitution and similar pressures https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_powder_substitute https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_powder_substitute If black-powder is strictly necessary and not just convenient, these substitutes would be used.