Ar500 steel plate can stop rifle bullets. In my brain I’m thinking like “well if kevlar is stronger than steel, then slab of kevlar of the same size of an ar500 plate should stop rifle bullets too”. Clearly it doesn’t and I don’t understand why
In: Engineering
Kevlar can stop a rifle bullet, the issue comes from the soft squishy thing behind the vest.
Handgun rounds are slow and don’t have a ton of energy. It’s like getting hit with a baseball comparatively. If someone throws a baseball at you and it hits you on the shirt in the stomach, the baseball won’t go through the shirt. When you pull up your shirt you’re going to have a baseball sized welt on your body right where it hit. This is ok for something like a baseball, it might hurt but it’s not a huge deal.
Rifle rounds have a lot of energy. They’re like a sledgehammer. Now replace the baseball with a 10lb sledgehammer. When someone hits you in the shirt, the shirt will stop the sledgehammer but all the sledgehammer force is going directly into the space it hit on your stomach and you’re going to have a very very bad day. Broken bones, internal bleeding, maybe some organ ruptures. You have a pretty good chance of being severely injured/dying from blunt force trauma.
How do we fix this? We put a big slab of very hard material under your shirt on the stomach. When you get hit with the sledgehammer, now all the sledgehammer force is distributed evenly along your entire stomach instead of just the sledgehammer face. Getting hit with the sledgehammer is still going to hurt, but it’s more like getting hit with a bunch of baseballs all over your stomach.
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