Traditionally, bullets become ineffective when underwater. However, U.S special forces may soon be able to shoot their weapons while submerged. These new bullets work by forming a bubble of air around a bullet, which allows the bullet to travel with less physical restrictions.
Ordinary bullets are designed to travel through the air at speeds greater than half a mile per second. Traveling through a different medium, well, that’s a different story. Bullets rapidly slow to a stop once they enter another medium—that’s a feature, not a flaw.
But what happens if bullets must travel through a medium other than air before striking their target? Water, for example, is 800 percent denser than air. Bullets quickly lose velocity, slowed by friction as they pass through the medium…
The CAV-X Supercavitating Ammunition is classified by the company as a “Multi-Environment Ammunition.” The company says “this projectile is effective against submerged targets and targets in the air. Depending on the weapon and the used loading variant, this ammunition is suitable for use in partial or fully submerged weapons, regardless of if the target is in water or on the surface.”
Check out more details over at Popular Mechanics.
(Image Credit: stevepb/ Pixabay)
I think they meant water is 800 times denser than air.
"Water has a density of 1000 kg/m^3. If you had a meter cubed of water it would weight about 1000 kg. Air that is near sea level has a density that averages 1.275 kg/m^3. If you have a balloon containing a meter cubed of sea level air, the air itself would weight only 1.275 kg. Therefore, to find how much more dense water is than air all we need to do is find a ratio of water to air. 1000 kg/m^3 divided by 1.275 kg/m^3 yields 784. Therefore, at sea level, air is 784 times less dense than water. Expressed in another way, a volume of air at sea level has 0.1275% of the density of the same volume of water. "