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In: Engineering
There’s many different kinds of AP projectile. For large bores and thick armor (tanks), traditional AP was done using shaped charges. These use explosives to fire a jet of extremely fast metal into the target. This is a HEAT head.
While not technically AP, squash heads work very differently and serve a similar purpose to HEAT. They are designed to create a pancake of high explosive pressed against the armor, and when this explodes it sends shards of the armor flying around the inside.
Small arms typically rely on cored ammunition. Regular bullets with hard cores. The cheap stuff uses steel, higher end ones use tungsten or carbide or even depleted uranium as these materials are much denser than steel. Density is key here.
Modern tank doctrine has shifted to kinetic penetrators. APDS. These are long, dense rods that move super fast. Tungsten or depleted uranium. They use a plastic case to fill up the rest of the barrel bore, since the rods are relatively thin, and this allows great speed. The speed allows the density to work its magic, but without a dense projectile the whole thing would be much less effective.
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