Ice Bullet not possible!

you can cut metal using water, so why not bullets then?

see this:






video.google.com...


[edit on 3-7-2008 by sty]

At first I thought about some kind of substance made with gypsum or something with endothermic properties, but then I realized that the answer is salt. If you use the right kind of salt, you give the target a heart attack to go along with his flesh wound.

the way i think to make the ice bullitt work would be to incase the ice projectile in a metal jacket and then freeze the jack as well as hace the ice bullitt protect form the gun powder by a thin heat resistant material. when the gun powder heats the case it should be heated to normal temp and the ice projectal should those still be frozen and the heat resistant would stop the gun powder from melting it. the jacket would then peel of leaving nothing but the ice bullitt.

reply to post by mig12


Well i got an email that warned me to not post what i had posted on the Mythbusters website. In it i broke everything down and not just in theory but how easily it could be done. The email traces back to the FBI in St. Louis. I was forwarned to not mention any more as i will not. However the way mythbusters crew did it was grossly misallocated. The worst possible way to test that myth. It's like firing a ice cube right out of your fridge with a potato gun. It does take some understanding as far as weapon design and chemistry to get the general operation and engineering aspect. Don't say it can't be done just because 2 people say it cant. There is always a way to design something that others say is impossible. Look at Einstiens theory of E=Mc2. The idea at the time of splitting an atom at it's core was thought be impossible. We all know how that turned out. Open your mind and think outside the box!

Never really thought about this but just reading the thread brought one thing into my mind

Pykrete

. Pykrete has some interesting properties, notably its relatively slow melting rate (due to low thermal conductivity), and its vastly improved strength and toughness over unmodified (crystalline) ice, actually closer to concrete.

There were plans to make Ice aircraft carriers out of this stuff in WW2 the increased strength I think would make a melting bullet possible.

I kind of suspect it would be possible with normal Ice as well but I have a feeling mythbusters wouldn't have shown a successful test either way.

Recalling the ice ships that were almost made in the last World War, having added sawdust which eliminated quick thawing and shattering of the ice...maybe something frozen in this way would at least propell the projectile in a scatter array.
Any thoughts?

Also, in reply to Lucifer's page one reply, I thought I would add a link to the origins of Snipers.

www.youtube.com...

Originally posted by MrRadicalEd
Well they tried the "ice bullet" three different ways. Just plain straight frozen water in liquid nitrogen to cast the mold of a bullet in to a rim fire shell. The bullet lobbed out only nicking the ballistics gel dummy failing to penatrait.

Then the other two methods was a frozen gel slug and a frozen ground beef slug. The frozen gel slug penatraited, but not like a real metal slug would. Then the frozen meat slug that did penatrait, but not as desired. So they moved in to the umbrella airgun idea that eventually worked.

[Edited on 22-11-2003 by MrRadicalEd]

They should have tried a dry-ice slug, about an inch long. That would withstand the heat from the gun, the pressure and still provide a hard projectile.

What you need is a frozen mercury bullet. using liquid nitrogen.
I'd like to see a memory metal bullet. Once fired changes shape and leaves no evidence of barrel scaring.

The mythbusters were trying it with a 6.5x55 rifle. That is just dumb, of course it wont work in a rifle.

It will work in a large caliber revolver with reduced loads. It also works as a shotgun slug. You open one end of the shell, take out the shot, and put some water in there, freeze it, and viola, you have an ice bullet. You have to keep the water off the powder however, either with a plastic wad, or otherwise. You have to store the ice ammo in the freeze, and use it shortly after taking it out. It helps to keep the gun in the freezer until it is time for use as well.

Post Deleted

I do not want to give someone a bad idea

[edit on 4-9-2008 by infolurker]

I just watched (on Google video) black and white 1960s era footage of Senate CIA hearings where they were passing around, looking at, and asking the CIA director about a special CIA dart gun that shoots a very small poisoned ice darts at point blank range (looked like it had a Co-2 tank on top of the barrel) just under the skin of the victim who would then have a heart attack(poison induced and untraceable)
I think they planned on using it on Castro

So just say you crush the ice and pack it sooo tightly under extreme pressure, and then you fire it out of the gun using highly compressed air / gas (which of course is extremely cold..... that there is going to be tooo much heat?

I personally find that a poison ice pellet is only effective when fired at medium range from a high powered co2 or air rifle. No hot gasses to destroy the projectile.

I'm not too sure about the idea of a rifle round being made from ice beings that it would be grossly out of balance and thus defeat the idea of "sniping" someone with it. I do know for a fact however that it is possible with shotguns, i have made ice slugs before by removing the shot and shot cup from a shell and then filling them with water and freezing. I shot two of them today at a 1/4 thick piece of plywood at close range, one made a dent, the other went right trough. I don't see the usefulness as an assassin weapon however due to the fact that they are noneffective at a long range, extremely loud, and why not just use buckshot anyway? it doesn't have any riffling on it. I think the ice bullet is possible in a rifle, but there are commercially available Frangible bullets used for home protection and by air marshals where you do not want them to penetrate walls or your target, they are designed to fragment on impact and often it takes as little as the fabric of the victims clothing to begin breaking the bullet apart that it would be very difficult to get a rifling off of them. That's my .02

-Randy

If you're really set on firing ice, use a large bore and fire it with compressed gas. I've broken through the screens of old CRT monitors using a 1.5 inch diameter ice projectile fired from a compressed air smoothbore. At about 90 psi, it'll pierce an inch of plywood.

This wouldn't exactly make sense as a covert assassination weapon; the result would look like blunt trauma; which shouldn't leave much evidence either. there's also be a fairly sizable puddle, with that much ice.

Remember; Ice is lighter than water per volume, since it floats on water, and water is much lighter per volume than metal, which quickly sinks in it. Ice is brittle. Ice bullets would not do well with rifling, nor supersonic speeds. You can't rely on sheer kinetic energy with ice projectiles, because they'll break apart. You have to rely on momentum. as it has little mass for it's volume compared to metal, to get good momentum, you need a relatively large projectile.

There might be some merit on using a small caliber low velocity smooth bore to fire ice bullets tipped with deadly poison, but if you're firing poison, there's all kinds of other nasty tricks that don't require refrigerated ammunition storage.

Originally posted by Lucifer
I find the discussion of violence, war and the like as primitive, unevolved and the obvious self-empowerment a one attempts to enjoy by sharing fear-based garbage like that. Sorry sniper talkers but there must be a little too much need in you for hairless-monkey talk like that! Who but a feeble and weak being believes that their life holds any value over another's by general majority? A killing-minded person has a definate disadvantage in personal growth and development, for that is just so animal mentality. This site is for intellectual and personal vision I thought.

this coming from a person with the user name LUCIFER

reply to post by mig12


Well I can answer this with confidence...no way! There is no ice bullet, I work for the Army as a civilian at Fort Belvoir Va where R&D is done all the time on the newest weapons and night vision/thermal imaging and if you know the physical attributes that make up a weapon and propel a bullet...you would laugh at this just like me.

I would love to see the bolt mechanism for this.

reply to post by stealthyaroura


Judging people by their choice of username is pretty low.

Though I must say, I don't know what Lucifer is doing in the weapons subforum if he feels that way.

An ice bullet may could possibly be fired from a high pressure air rifle as it would not melt the bullet.

I find this thread rather interesting for some weird reason.

Still I think most likely a compressed dart of some type with some poison on it's tip would be the easiest to make. . .

I'm only speculating here but. . .

But after careful thought, one really could build a frozen round. Maybe not of ICE if you wanted it to have good weight or sectional density for flight. But there are other materials one could use.

Most likely you wouldn't use a normal propellant, but a gas that would expand rapidly at a lower temperature or something similar to a cyrogenic liquid combined with a carefully calculated expanding heating charge of some type. Digging though my old books, LOX (liquid oxygen) for example expands at a rate of 861 to 1 @ 68 deg F. (I'm not saying LOX is a viable material since it might ignite any oils in your gun. And the fact it's highly reactive. But something with a high expansion ratio.) It would be a one shot affair however, and unless you can get your propellant to produce gunpowers pressures forget about cycling the action on some assault rifle or machine gun. . . What you are trying to create is a controlled BLEVE (boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion) and keeping the expanding gas fairly cold in the process.

As a side note: (I believe most .308 cartridges (closest match to a 7.62 x 51mm Nato) out there produce 50,000 to 67,000 psi at the chamber depending on what you combine (cartridge, case, primer, , but then again you would have to match up the weight of your bullet to your charge. Bullets for that caliber run anywhere from 55? grains (plasic saboted - no longer made? I'm thinking of the winchester accelerator ammo btw.) to 250 grains)

Most likey the if you are using ice the round would be in the subsonic catagory unless you took the time to wrap the round in a protein chain or plasma (not the hot stuff folks but what's in your blood stream) or basically something that will melt off and blend with the target. Ideally you would put it into a cartridge that would fit a normal gun, and go that way with it. And to be effective you would probabily want to keep it larger caliber with a lowered barrel spin (rifling)

Something to remember is bullets are made though many methods, some fragmentation rounds are made by pressing powdered metal together. I seem to remember some claims about some law enforcement officer shooting a pistol out of some guy's hand while he sat in a chair in the middle of some road . . . and the round that was used was claimed to be one of these 'pressed' fragmentation rounds. To speculate a bit since I don't remember the details, I think the round was used to prevent a ricochet?

Now that I've said all of that all I'm trying to get you to understand is it's all in how you put the materials together. Don't think at STP or standard, temperature and pressure. . . (68 degs F and 14 psi / 1 ATM (- weight of atmospheric air btw)) when these bullets are put together but at a perhapse much lower temperature and quite possible higher pressure. And the same could be said of the propellant.

Something also someone must remember that ideally you will have to store the round somewhere under certain conditions before deployment.

Now rather this is practical? Heh. . . who knows. We as people have built alot of strange things out there, and one only has to do a light search to find that out. Still I find some of these things interesting to analyze.