At 1:56 PM +0000 1/8/01, Olaf Greve wrote:
The US Gatling-type aircraft guns make the coolest sounds as they
wind up to speed (very quickly of course), firing their rounds.
The sequence of sounds is: high-speed electric whine, very fast
banging of the rounds firing followed by the firecrackers of sonic
booms. If they were shooting explosive rounds the bangs at the
target would follow the sonic booms.
I can only imagine...:)
Anyone who will ever have heard just how much sound a normal, say 9mm,
hand gun already makes when it is fired, will probably look in awe at
how laughably small such a bullet is when compared to the 20mm,
27mm, and especially the 30mm rounds pictured on my page. I wonder
if the sound gets proportinally louder as the size of the rounds
(well, the casings, really) increases. Makes me wonder what the
sound would have been that was produced when the 120mm Howitzer
casing I have at home was fired. Then, to take things to the
extreme: I don't think I would have particularly liked being close
to the guns that were used on ships like the USS Missouri to send
the 800+ KG projectiles on a one way ticket towards the enemy. ;)
A couple of data points: my uncle, who served in the royal artillery in ww2
(after first being interned as an enemy alien) acquired a substantial
hearing deficit over the course of a year or so; for the battleships
I have read that the decks are cleared around the guns when firing, because
the shock wave can be lethal at close range. This gets out of the range of
what one usually thinks of as sound and into that of weather.
paul
--
Paul Wallich pw@xxxxxxxxx
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