I took explosive rounds out of my game Options

[Wounded Ronin]

Not every single cop is like that!

There might be a few, but not the vast majority.

Cops, for the most part, are decent, hard working folks doing a shitty job. Give them SOME credit BlueMax.

Dude, this is Shadowrun. We're playing in artsy fartsy left-wing-fears dystopia land with eville cops. Not right wing dystopia heroic cops with fists clenched to the wind and a single tear trickling down the outside of our cheek land.

[Larme]

Shhh! Don't tell that to Critias, he will come to your house. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/eek.gif)

(j/k Critias, we have fun (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif) )

[kzt]

If explosive rounds aren't practical right now, is it because the theory is flawed, or because we simply don't have the means to cheaply produce reliable detonators (to pick on just one argument raised)?

The problem with the concept as SR presents is that they are also extra special AP rounds. In order for an explosive small arm round to be effective against a person it has to enter their body, as you can only have a tiny amount of explosives in a pistol or assault rifle bullet. The round exploding against their body armor does less damage than a normal bullet. The round is also going to have a much lower cross-sectional density than a round of solid metal, as explosives are inherently a lot less dense than steel. So it's ability to penetrate armor should really suck compared to a generic FMJ bullet.

[ornot]

One could argue that the explosive in exEX generates some kind of extra penetrating round, like the shaped charge effect used in some tank shells.

Still, I'm not overly familiar with guns or ammo, so I shouldn't get involved in this discussion. It is true that the ammo rules in SR will make your head hurt if you try to think too hard about what they actually entail.

[Dancer]

I usually use flechette rounds when I'm trying to stay legal. They cost more, but do about the same damage on average as EX.

(DV +2 vs Impact armor + 5. Impact armor is usually a couple of points lower than ballistic, so that's about +3 net armor. 3 resistance dice is equivalent to 1 DV, so that gives a net average bonus of +1DV, the same as EX and fractionally lower than EX-EX)

[mrlost]

Not every single cop is like that!

There might be a few, but not the vast majority.

Cops, for the most part, are decent, hard working folks doing a shitty job. Give them SOME credit BlueMax.

What country do you live in? My local cops were also meth dealers and I'm in California (now our town doesn't even have a police force they were disbanded after the scandal and its a small town). I shudder at the thought of LAPD or NYPD.

Shadowrun cops are private security and they've gotta be worse, like Blackwater mercs.

One of my players is a corrections officer i.e. prison guard. The high point of his job is when he gets to shoot inmates with their new non-lethal weapons because their so fun, and then share it with the rest of us. Suffice it to say, I haven't been inviting him to games lately.

Anyway, to the OP I haven't seen the need to eliminate Explosive rounds. Most of the players don't use them anyway. Usually SnS rounds, Narcojet injection arrows, or Pepperpunch grenades get used a lot. The PCs have a plan to acquire some Ares Redline lasers for the prestige factor though.

The big issue in the game has been how to smuggle their kit across national and corporate borders because they can't just take them on the suborbital flight with them, and they often have to jump continents daily.

[InfinityzeN]

Dancer speaks truth here. Also, I don't know why everyone is so hot for APDS rounds. Unless you are going after a target with hardened armor, EX-EX rounds will have the same or slightly greater damage on average. I have always been a firm believer in having access to a large variety of ammo types. You use what works best against the chosen target.

As for saying that EX-EX should have less pen then normal rounds, you have to take into account the cost. I have always considered EX and EX-EX rounds to function the same way as Explosive and Fragmenting Flechettes do in CP2020. They are pre-fragmented rounds with a light coating and a gram or so explosive thread that makes them completely fragment within the target, releasing all their energy. For EX-EX, just make the bullet out of something like Tungsten Carbide in a dove-tail penetration design, pre-fragmented with a micro-charge of explosive.

On a side note, Kendachi Frag-Flechettes from CP2020 were the scariest rounds I've ever seen. A mixture of orbital grown crystal (high tech synthetic diamond), memory metals (programed to form razor-blade fishhooks), and a micro-charge of several needle shaped/sized top grade military explosive with a ultra dense orbital grown penetrating tip in a APDS design. They were tied for best armor piercing ability (divide armor by 4), but unlike AP rounds which halved all damage after armor (shooting through the target), they increased it by +50%.

So they slice right through armor as a high density flechette, the set off a micro charge a nano second after entering the body. The target gets chunks of the highest quality industrial cutting diamond and spinning razor-blade fishhooks in the struck location. Oh yea, and the target bled like a stuck pig while the medic/doc had massive trouble treating the injury.

[kzt]

The big issue in the game has been how to smuggle their kit across national and corporate borders because they can't just take them on the suborbital flight with them, and they often have to jump continents daily.

If you are playing in those leagues just require the client to provide the gear you want after customs. Or you turn around and get back on the suborbital.

[MaxMahem]

The problem with the concept as SR presents is that they are also extra special AP rounds. In order for an explosive small arm round to be effective against a person it has to enter their body, as you can only have a tiny amount of explosives in a pistol or assault rifle bullet. The round exploding against their body armor does less damage than a normal bullet. The round is also going to have a much lower cross-sectional density than a round of solid metal, as explosives are inherently a lot less dense than steel. So it's ability to penetrate armor should really suck compared to a generic FMJ bullet.

Consider for a moment that your average handgun round is propelled by ~.5 grams of gunpowder or so. Gunpowder that is specifically designed to not detonate, but deflagrate very rapidly. While the bullet that powder propels can mass about 10 times as much. Also consider that there exist explosives not constrained by the same limitations that gunpowder operates under. And thus are considerably more energy dense than gunpowder.

Now there may be many reasons why explosive rounds have not become common for small caliber rounds, including complexity, reliability, and cost. But I don't believe that performance is one of them. In terms of energy delivered to a target, explosive rounds offer incredible potential, especially if that explosion can be triggered after the round has penetrated into its target.

Indeed the only real performance downside to a potential explosive rounds is that explosives are less dense then lead and not as structurely strong which, in simplistic designs, tends to reduce armor penetrating performance. But this is not a guaranteed problem. With some clever engineering you can have an explosive round that does not compromise armor penetrating performance. Especially at the relatively low velocities small-arms ammunitions uses. Indeed explosive rounds of this type are now common on .50< caliber rounds.

The reason this has not been translated to smaller rounds has nothing to do with the exploding round concept. The advantages explosive rounds provide for larger caliber rounds don't magically disappear in smaller rounds. Only the engineering challenges become more difficult. Indeed, explosive rifle rounds have been used in the past, despite the cost issues stemming from their complexity. We would probably see more extensive use of them today, except the Hauge convention specifically outlawed the.

[kzt]

The advantages explosive rounds provide for larger caliber rounds don't magically disappear in smaller rounds. Only the engineering challenges become more difficult. Indeed, explosive rifle rounds have been used in the past, despite the cost issues stemming from their complexity. We would probably see more extensive use of them today, except the Hauge convention specifically outlawed the.

Right, so you are going to have pistol bullets that kill everyone within 5 meters like a 25mm HE round? No, the effects don't magically disappear, it's that tiny amounts of explosives result in tiny explosions. For example, a 5.56 bullet, weight 55 grains, or 3.5 grams. Assuming you get an explosive as good as TNT and as dense as lead and make the bullet out of solid HE and make it explode you get about 8 times as much energy from 3.5 gm of TNT as you do from a 3.5 gm round moving at 1km/sec.

But you'll need a fuze on it so it doesn't explode when you drop a magazine. So we'll assume 1 gram (this is highly optimistic). You need some sort of container to keep the high explosive from getting really hot due to barrel friction and from the propellant. Assume 1/2gm. So you'll have the space of 2gm of lead to fill with explosive.

Sadly, compressing the hell out of explosives normally results in one of the things: They become unstable or they become very difficult to detonate. Neither of these seems like a good idea. The highest theoretical density of any explosive that is theoretically possible is octanitrocubane, which has a density of 2g/cm^3. Octanitrocubane is 2.7 times more powerful than TNT. (We'll assume that energy and RE are directly related - I have no idea if it is)

Lead has a density of 11.35. So 2 gm of lead = 0.35gm of octanitrocubane. So we get about 3950J. Or about 2.25 times the energy of a standard M16 bullet using what are probably the most optimistic set of assumptions you can make and assuming an unlimited budget for ammo.

As the 3.5 gram bullet is now a 1.85 gm bullet I suspect the MV is more like 1400m/sec (and the muzzle energy a lot more than the baseline), though given the crappy cross-sectional density it's going to be both bad at penetrating armor and long-range accuracy. Somehow I don't see the equivalent of 1 gm of TNT blowing holes in tanks or killing people several meters away with the blast.

If you can design a light round that is great at penetrating armor you can certainly use that technique on bullets that are not expensively filled with low density explosive.

[Larme]

I think one thing you're not thinking about is shaped charges. You're assuming that the round must enter the target before detonating, but I don't think ExEx rounds actually do it like that. If they did, it wouldn't be such a minor increase to DV, it would me more of an instant death thing, where armor can't save you if the round gets into you. But ExEx rounds only increase DV a little, and they increase AP at the same time. The only explanation for this is shaped charges. When the round hits, the explosive detonates all in one direction, adding extra energy to the impact and helping it to penetrate further. It isn't a "gets inside you and explodes" thing, it's a "explodes on impact, driving it further inside" kind of thing. It's a solution to Armor Piercing rounds -- by making a small, sharp bullet, you make a round which passes right through people, penetrating their armor but doing less damage (or in SR, the same damage, because I guess they've solved part of that problem somehow). ExEx pierces armor by adding consussive force to the impact, it's almost like using a round with a bigger powder charge, only without the increased recoil because the second charge only fires when it hits the target.

Also, are you really assuming they'd be using TNT, one of the oldest explosives known to man, in ExEx rounds? Nanofacturing allows the creation of chemicals we can't currently produce. Nanobots would let us mimic the most powerful force in chemistry, the enzyme. Enzymes change the activation energies and equilibria of reactions by their physical shape alone. If you could customize them, you could make chemical reactions happen that would never happen naturally. You can also stabilize unstable molecules with enzymes, just create sites that bind to the reactive portion of your molecule and render it inert. By combining a catalyst with a stablizing enzyme, you could make incredibly dense, powerful explosives that are as stable as modern explosives.

[Dr Funfrock]

Somehow I don't see the equivalent of 1 gm of TNT blowing holes in tanks or killing people several meters away with the blast.

Um... OK. I honestly don't see where you're going with this. Nobody ever suggested explosive ammo could do any of those things. It's only +1 DV, -1 AP. That's hardly "blowing holes in tanks", and it doesn't add any blast radius, so no, it won't be killing people several meters away with the blast. I don't get why you're arguing that point when nobody ever made.

Your calculations demonstrate that you can get 2.25 times the normal energy of an M16 round. You state that this is an optimistic value; well OK. A standard M16 round in Shadowrun is DV6, AP -1. With EX-EX it goes up to DV7, AP-2. That's hardly "2.25 times" as much damage, or energy, or whatever (ok, so I'm sure that energy and DV are going to be far from linear, but doubling the energy for +1 DV sounds like a fair conversion). And as Llarme pointed out, using optimistic calculations for present technology is probably a pretty good way of ending up at the likely results of technology 70 years from now, so if anything you seem to be showing that explosive rounds are understatted.

From the tone of your statements, you seem to be arguing against explosive rounds being practical, but as far as I can see you've just offered an excellent proof of concept for them. What have I missed here?

[MaxMahem]

Right, so you are going to have pistol bullets that kill everyone within 5 meters like a 25mm HE round? No, the effects don't magically disappear, it's that tiny amounts of explosives result in tiny explosions.

I never said you would get the same effect you would get from a grenade or some such, I said you could get superior energy delivered to the target then you would with a simple inert bullet. Lead is inert. Besides the energy that the propeleant gives it, it provides no additional energy to the target.

For example, a 5.56 bullet, weight 55 grains, or 3.5 grams. Assuming you get an explosive as good as TNT and as dense as lead and make the bullet out of solid HE and make it explode you get about 8 times as much energy from 3.5 gm of TNT as you do from a 3.5 gm round moving at 1km/sec.

Your forgetting that that energy from the bullets momentum doesn't disappear when you replace it with explosives, it is added on top of it. So your hypothetical TNT bullet would inflict not only the energy it does from exploding, but will maintain the energy of the bullet as well.

But you'll need a fuze on it so it doesn't explode when you drop a magazine. So we'll assume 1 gram (this is highly optimistic). You need some sort of container to keep the high explosive from getting really hot due to barrel friction and from the propellant. Assume 1/2gm. So you'll have the space of 2gm of lead to fill with explosive.

Sadly, compressing the hell out of explosives normally results in one of the things: They become unstable or they become very difficult to detonate. Neither of these seems like a good idea. The highest theoretical density of any explosive that is theoretically possible is octanitrocubane, which has a density of 2g/cm^3. Octanitrocubane is 2.7 times more powerful than TNT. (We'll assume that energy and RE are directly related - I have no idea if it is)

Lead has a density of 11.35. So 2 gm of lead = 0.35gm of octanitrocubane. So we get about 3950J. Or about 2.25 times the energy of a standard M16 bullet using what are probably the most optimistic set of assumptions you can make and assuming an unlimited budget for ammo.

I'll make it simpler. For you, lets assume you have to trade off lead for explosives in your bullet at a ratio equivalent to there densities (not necessarily true, but a good enough fudge). Thus ever Thus every gram of Lead replaced with explosive is equivalent to ~.2g of explosives. Now 1g of anything moving at 1km/s delivers 500J of energy. Octanitrocubane delivers 8.5kJ of energy per gram. Plus another (rather insignificant) 100J from the explosives velocity., so there is your ratio right there. SOTA explosives are about 17 times as energy dense as lead. Though this analysis is simplistic, as it ignores the higher velocity you might expect from a light bullet (not likely to be terribly significant) and the mass of any detonator (this would kick the effective density down a bit, but mass of a fuse is hard to estimate). Even so, the results speak for themselves. Certainly for unarmed targets it would make sense to have your bullet to be made up of as much boom as possible. Even if it only detonates on the surface and say 75% of the blast energy is lost, we would still have a much more effective bullet. Put in perspective, our hypothetical pure explosive bullet might contain 4grams of high explosive, which is comparable the amount of gunpowder used to propel the bullet in the first place, only deployed much more efficiently on the target. Of course it is going to be more damaging.

Now of course in practice you can't have a pure explosive bullet, nor would you want to. But it is clear that explosives, even given their lower density, are a much more effective way for delivering energy on a target. This is amply true at rifle velocities, and even truer at lower velocities. Indeed you have to pass 4km/s before lead starts to look like a better choice. The only other consideration is armor penetration. So the key for explosive bullets will be much the same as in the shells of 14" cannons. You want enough casing to provide the structural stiffness you need to penetrate the armor, and no more.

As the 3.5 gram bullet is now a 1.85 gm bullet I suspect the MV is more like 1400m/sec (and the muzzle energy a lot more than the baseline), though given the crappy cross-sectional density it's going to be both bad at penetrating armor and long-range accuracy. Somehow I don't see the equivalent of 1 gm of TNT blowing holes in tanks or killing people several meters away with the blast.

If you can design a light round that is great at penetrating armor you can certainly use that technique on bullets that are not expensively filled with low density explosive.

Again, I never said you could expect explosive rounds to do all that. But even a lowly gram or two of lead replaced with an explosive filling could, if engineered properly, result in a great gains in performance. Lead is a poor penetrator in any case, it is to soft. Most armor piercing bullets are made (or capped) with tougher metals like steal or tungsten. Which while considerably lighter then lead, are much better penetrators due to their stiffness.

---

I think one thing you're not thinking about is shaped charges.

Ah, the ARES SEX (Shaped charge EXplosive) rounds you mean eh? Sounds like a good follow up to the ARES APEX...

[kzt]

I think one thing you're not thinking about is shaped charges.

Shaped charges don't work very well in anything that rotates at the speed of a rifle bullet. High rotation rates tend to tear apart the jet. Plus you have all sorts of ugly issues involving standoff and the minor detail that the diameter of the shaped charge directly correlates to how much armor you penetrate. So you'd lose the entire volume of the ogive. Which reduces the mass again. You'd likely end up with a round that penetrated less effectively than a FMJ, much less a steel core like modern rifles.

You might get somewhere with a pistol bullet, as they tend to be much slower, larger diameter, and vastly inferior in ability to penetrate cover.

Also, are you really assuming they'd be using TNT, one of the oldest explosives known to man, in ExEx rounds?

No, I assumed the use of Octanitrocubane, which is I believe is currently thought to be the most dense explosive that is theoretically possible without the use of antimatter.

[Dr Funfrock]

And your response to the points that MaxMahem and I raised...?
(Not trying to be nasty here or anything like that. I'd just been hoping for some clarification on your previous post).

[MaxMahem]

Um... OK. I honestly don't see where you're going with this. Nobody ever suggested explosive ammo could do any of those things. It's only +1 DV, -1 AP. That's hardly "blowing holes in tanks", and it doesn't add any blast radius, so no, it won't be killing people several meters away with the blast. I don't get why you're arguing that point when nobody ever made.

Its called a strawman, one of the oldest debating tricks in the book.

[IceKatze]

hi hi

Is there a particularly big difference between adding energy to a projectile when it is fired as opposed to when it hits its target?

If I'm not mistaken, most explosive armor penetrators use a "second stage" projectile with less mass then the whole to transfer energy more efficiently to. Though I'm pretty sure that it is to counteract drag from air, because in a vacuum you ought to be able to transfer all the energy directly to the second stage penetrator and have more efficient results.

Perhaps the bottleneck then is in the barrel of whatever gun you are firing? That would seem to be a plausible reason. For example, modern railguns shred their rails when fired.

[Larme]

Shaped charges don't work very well in anything that rotates at the speed of a rifle bullet. High rotation rates tend to tear apart the jet. Plus you have all sorts of ugly issues involving standoff and the minor detail that the diameter of the shaped charge directly correlates to how much armor you penetrate. So you'd lose the entire volume of the ogive. Which reduces the mass again. You'd likely end up with a round that penetrated less effectively than a FMJ, much less a steel core like modern rifles.

You might get somewhere with a pistol bullet, as they tend to be much slower, larger diameter, and vastly inferior in ability to penetrate cover.


No, I assumed the use of Octanitrocubane, which is I believe is currently thought to be the most dense explosive that is theoretically possible without the use of antimatter.

I'm not sure if I a) understand anything you just said, or b) if it even proves anything. "Issues involving standoff" is not exactly a clear or convincing statement. I can look up what standoff and ogive means on wikipedia, but if you just glibly state these terms, your argument doesn't really go anywhere. I'd like to learn about these "issues," but without more explanation I can't be convinced that you've actually said anything that makes sense. As I think of it, the goal of a shaped charge would be to go off as the front of the bullet (the ogive?) penetrates the target, driving it in further and increasing penetration. So "losing the volume" of it shouldn't be an issue.

And not only did you ignore all the points by people who know stuff about physics, you ignored my points about the theoretical possibilities for nanochemical compounds. Even if we ignore that for the moment though, you can be sure that the milspec explosives of 2070 beat the crap out of modern milspec explosives. Don't believe me? Just look at what they were using in 1939, q.e.d.

[kzt]

And your response to the points that MaxMahem and I raised...?
(Not trying to be nasty here or anything like that. I'd just been hoping for some clarification on your previous post).

Octanitrocubane was chosen as the best possible case, along with other details. In reality that are likely to be somewhat less. The fuze is a major deal. My assumption of a gram is was pretty darn aggressive. It's really hard to imagine a mechanical fuze that you could fit in an assault rifle bullet, as you normally don't want the bullet armed until after the round is fired, it spins up to speed and then it hits something. You could in theory do a totally electrical fuzes, but this has some obvious issues too.

Essentially what has been found by people trying to use explosive small arms bullets is that they have about the exact same or less effect as a non-explosive bullet.

You just get such a tiny amount of explosive that can fit after you put the metal needed to hold the bullet together during firing and the 5000 RPM it's spinning at that the effects are not particularly noticeable.

To steal the example of the 14" shells, iirc, there was no actual difference found in combat between the effect of the British 14" AP shells and the APHE shells in WW2. The effects of the explosive were sufficiently trivial due to the minimal mass of the explosive compared to the round and the enormous damage done by just the AP round.

As another example, James Brady was struck in the head by a .22LR explosive bullet (which detonated) when he got in the line of fire as Hinckley was attempting to assassinate President Regan. According to multiple experts Brady survived the attack partially because the bullet was an explosive bullet, as a normal solid would have almost certainly killed him. This bullet didn't have a fuze, it was just a canister of lead azide (a highly sensitive explosive typically used as a detonator) embed in the bullet. As far as can be determined, that and one that struck the armored glass of the limo were the only bullets that exploded of the 6 bullets that he fired (5 were recovered, the last was fired into the air as a SS officer leaped him). The other 3 people shot didn't have the bullets explode. However I am told that the devastator bullets Hinckley used were typically incredibly effective on steel soda cans.

So there really isn't an evidence that you can actually make a safe and reliable explosive bullet for a small arm, much less one that is significantly more effective against people than a non-explosive bullet of the same class. And it's pretty unlikely that anyone would develop any, as the R&D would cost a fortune and there isn't really a mass market for horrifically expensive bullets that carry military explosives and are likely to be only marginally more effective than a regular bullet.

[kzt]

Just look at what they were using in 1939, q.e.d.

RDX was developed in 1898, and was commercially produced in 1922. It's 1.6 times as effective as TNT.
PETN was developed in 1891 and was commercially produced in 1912. It's 1.66 times as effective as TNT.

I could go on, but the point is that the only explosive we use that was commercially produced after 1939 is HMX. And it was developed in 1930. Alone it is 1.7 times as effective as TNT, but is rarely used alone.

So no, there haven't been any dramatic changes in what explosives we are using. The only possible explosive that will produce dramatic changes is Octanitrocubane, but we have barely made enough for the basic tests. It's apparently a hugely complex task to make, requiring something on the order of 50 different steps. And one of the nice things about Octanitrocubane as a military explosive is that it is quite insensitive, so it requires a detonator to make it explode.

[Larme]

You do realize we're talking about the future, right? You're talking about modern evidence, using modern materials and modern manufacturing techniques. You seem to think this proves something about fictional 2070. I bet that in the revolutionary war, they would have told you that a bullet which contains its own powder charge was a madman's dream, because they couldn't imagine a manufacturing process that would crank that kind of ammo out efficiently. Your failure to imagine how a futuristic piece of gear would work is not evidence that it couldn't, it's simply a failure of your imagination. Like I said before, the possibilities of nanotech are endless, they would allow us to manipulate chemistry at the molecular level, something that so far is the sole province of living enzymes, which are far too complex for us to imitate. But once we master nanotech, we'll be able to create compounds which are completely impossible today, probably using much simpler syntheses.

[WeaverMount]

The only possible explosive that will produce dramatic changes is Octanitrocubane

I smell bias and ego. Not sure where or how, but they usually lurk around statements like that.

[Adarael]

Additionally, this arguement is meangingless. You don't like EX-EX, take them out - great. You don't think they're believable, great, take them out. You like them but find the science to be bullshit? Great, explain them a different way - maybe they're dual purpose wounds that are extremely effective, or maybe they're like mini cratering charges, or maybe there's tyiny trolls in them and the trolls punch the target as the bullets hit.,,

But let's be honest here, there's a ton of shit that stretches credulity in Shadowrun, and EX-EX isn't exactly at the top of the list.
You either play with it, or you don't. I don't think we need yet another thread about how firearms in Shadowrun don't work quite like how they do IRL.

[MaxMahem]

Octanitrocubane was chosen as the best possible case, along with other details. In reality that are likely to be somewhat less. The fuze is a major deal. My assumption of a gram is was pretty darn aggressive. It's really hard to imagine a mechanical fuze that you could fit in an assault rifle bullet, as you normally don't want the bullet armed until after the round is fired, it spins up to speed and then it hits something. You could in theory do a totally electrical fuzes, but this has some obvious issues too.

Certainly not unsurmountable ones, as explosive ammunition is in wide use in calibers as small as .50cal. Obviously it is possible to design mechanical fuses for these rounds. And its not like SR isn't a high-tech future setting with ubiquitous, highly advanced, and very small, computing. An electrical fuse is childs play for a setting with nano-machines, AI's and Simsense, like Shadowruns. And rankly even today, I find the mass of a fuse to be an unconvincing argument against an explosive bullet. Even if it decreased the effective density by half or more, we would still be looking at a substantial increase in energy delivered over plain lead.

Essentially what has been found by people trying to use explosive small arms bullets is that they have about the exact same or less effect as a non-explosive bullet.

You just get such a tiny amount of explosive that can fit after you put the metal needed to hold the bullet together during firing and the 5000 RPM it's spinning at that the effects are not particularly noticeable.

Even a quarter of a gram gram of explosive can deliver more explosive energy then an entire rifle bullet can. Remember we are talking about explosives that could be as much as 17 times as powerful per gram then the mass of lead. It doesn't take a lot to get a noticable effect. I've avoided making references to this for graphicness sake, but what nothing good can happen to a target when even a small amount of explosive is detonated within its body. Consider again then that the rifle bullet itself is propelled by only a few grams of (weaker) gunpowder in the first place.

To steal the example of the 14" shells, iirc, there was no actual difference found in combat between the effect of the British 14" AP shells and the APHE shells in WW2. The effects of the explosive were sufficiently trivial due to the minimal mass of the explosive compared to the round and the enormous damage done by just the AP round.

You would think if this was accurate then shell designers would learn the error of their ways, and remove explosive fillings from canon rounds. However this does not seem to be the case. As explosive ammunition remains common (predominate even) in all calibers above .50cal indeed in all calibers in which it is legal under the Hauge convention. Indeed your example misses the very point of larger caliber rounds has generally been to throw more explosive weight!

As another example, James Brady was struck in the head by a .22LR explosive bullet (which detonated) when he got in the line of fire as Hinckley was attempting to assassinate President Regan. According to multiple experts Brady survived the attack partially because the bullet was an explosive bullet, as a normal solid would have almost certainly killed him. This bullet didn't have a fuze, it was just a canister of lead azide (a highly sensitive explosive typically used as a detonator) embed in the bullet. As far as can be determined, that and one that struck the armored glass of the limo were the only bullets that exploded of the 6 bullets that he fired (5 were recovered, the last was fired into the air as a SS officer leaped him). The other 3 people shot didn't have the bullets explode. However I am told that the devastator bullets Hinckley used were typically incredibly effective on steel soda cans.

There is a lot of confusion about those "devestator bullets" some source say some exploded, some say none. Indeed you contradict yourself in your own statement (was the one that struck the window the only one that exploded or the one that hit James Bradly in the head?). Wounding effects are quite variable, though. Had the bullet which ricocheted and hit President Regan detonated (it was lodged near his heart) history might very well be difference. I would also point out that though James Bradley survived (a miracle that), he was partially paralyzed for life due to the injury. In fact in prompted him to become the sponsor of some well known anti-gun legislation...

In any case those .22LR bullets are hardly a good example of the effects we might expect from a more serious explosive bullet. One still designed with armor penetration in mind (something the devastators were certainly not), a more reliable detonator, and a more powerful explosive filling.

So there really isn't an evidence that you can actually make a safe and reliable explosive bullet for a small arm, much less one that is significantly more effective against people than a non-explosive bullet of the same class. And it's pretty unlikely that anyone would develop any, as the R&D would cost a fortune and there isn't really a mass market for horrifically expensive bullets that carry military explosives and are likely to be only marginally more effective than a regular bullet.

The poor performance of those .22LR rounds in attempting to assassinate Regan is hardly proves explosive bullets impossible. But history shows they are anything but impossible. In addition to the numerous explosive rounds in .50 or greater caliber in service now, smaller caliber explosive rounds have been developed several times, including versions for the British 303, 7.62 Russian and others. Were it not illegal, we might see more of it today.

Now I am not saying that explosive rounds don't have problems, including tougher engineering challenges for penetration, reliability, and cost. But in the SR setting it is reasonable to believe that these issues have been dealt with. And there is enough demand from security forces (and other markets) for the development and sale of explosive rounds.

[Larme]

@kzt: Talk about incorrigible. We say "the past proves little if anything about the (science fiction) future," and you counter with examples of bullets from the 1980's that didn't work very well...