A Stupid Question

[ArtPahl]

Something I've thought of several times. The Private Ryan movie, in the scene where the 03A4 guy is in the bell tower with the tank gun elevating toward him: Would a bullet down the barrel of the tank gun into the fuse of the shell have set it off in the chamber? I know; I know, as my wife keeps telling me when I make a comment about a scene in a movie, "It's just a movie!"

[Daan Kemp]

No, the travel of the shell arms it a distance from the muzzle to prevent too early activation, ie in the barrel or too close. IDK what a bullet in the barrel with the shell would mean.

[Flying10uk]

guy is in the bell tower with the tank gun elevating toward him: Would a bullet down the barrel of the tank gun into the fuse of the shell have set it off in the chamber?

Basic trigonometry would dictate that the bullet fired from the bell tower would have to be fired in a downwards angle at exactly the same angle that the tank gun is pointing upwards towards the bell tower, i.e. not just a case of firing a round into the muzzle of the tank's gun. Also the bullet would have to be fired along the centre axis of the tank's gun bore. If these conditions were not met then the bullet would hit the inside of the tank's gun barrel before reaching the shell. Highly unlikely that these conditions would ever be met.

[CINDERS]

I heard/read somewhere of an instance in WWI where combatants were shooting at each other from their respective trenches and a 7.92 projectile went straight into the muzzle & barrel of a 303 with a rather catastrophic affect on the barrel of the MkIII.
Needless to say the user of that rifle got more recoil than he anticipated, I've also heard of rifle projectiles being mashed together as well as penetrating another in flight with the billions fired in WWI it must have happened on the odd occasion.

[oldfoneguy]

I've also heard of rifle projectiles being mashed together as well as penetrating another in flight with the billions fired in WWI it must have happened on the odd occasion.

I can't speak for WWI or WWII battlefields but I can attest to those from the American Civil War (WBTS for Southerners).
As a kid with my family we toured a large selection of battlefields while the 100th anniversary remembrances took place back in the 1960's. Nearly every major battlefield had a museum of sorts containing retrieved items in glass cases and inevitably all had a selection of bullets that hit each other head on, some had hundreds of them. It was genuinely sobering to see these 300 to 500 grain projectiles that were traveling 1300 to 1800 feet per second colliding at nearly 3000 feet per second. I could only imagine collisions between WWI/WWII projectiles that are much smaller and lighter yet traveling at twice that speed.

[MikeinNC]

Fuses were designed to be safe until a certain number of revolutions occurred after setback(firing). I don’t think that a bullet impacting the fuse would set off a fuse while it was still safe (sitting in the barrel ) it would just make the fuse inoperable.

I’m going off my limited knowledge of fuses from when I was a gunners mate in the CG (1988-2011) and our fuses were much more sophisticated than back then.

[ssgross]

It's not terribly difficult to prove that given any target there are exactly two trajectories from the shooter that intersect the target (first few pages of Cranz's Handbook of ballistics vol. 1). So, sitting in the bell tower there are two possible muzzle angles of the tank that would do the trick, one for each trajectory. Given the velocity of the bullet at the time it reaches the tank's muzzle, and the length of the tank's barrel I think we will see that the drop of the bullet (relative to the angle of the tank barrel) is such that a perfect shot is indeed "possible".

Reminds me of a joke...a Mathematician, a physicist and an engineer chaperone a camping trip. A brush fire starts in the night. The engineer reads the manual on the fire extinguisher and the physicist calculates the most likely direction the fire will spread. The mathematician wakes up, sees the engineer and physicist, and says "Aha! A solution exists" and goes back to bed.

[jamie5070]

Now the question is, If a .30 cal bullet goes into the tanks bore and were to become wedged between the cannon projectile and barrel, Would it become a large enough bore obstruction to damage the tank when it fired its next round?

[MAC702]

Now the question is, If a .30 cal bullet goes into the tanks bore and were to become wedged between the cannon projectile and barrel, Would it become a large enough bore obstruction to damage the tank when it fired its next round?

This was my first thought. It won't set off the shell in the chamber, but it will very likely cause a very bad shot, with damage to the bore afterward. And it wouldn't need to be a perfect shot down the barrel. Just getting it into the muzzle at shallow enough angle to bounce it down would be sufficient.

But I have a problem with the thread subject. THIS IS NOT A STUPID QUESTION!

[Jim Tarleton]

Given a few hundred automatic rifles going off opposing each other in a relatively small area, it is hard to believe this doesn't happen on a fairly frequent basis. If you are in such a fight, you are amazed the rounds don't bang together like billiard balls on a pool table, especially if the fight is at night and a few machine guns are wailing away at each other. The tracer rounds look like a dense lacework of green and red laser beams in a museum. When I was fresh in country and assigned to my first firebase, I loaded tracer rounds in my M16. My first night engagement made me realize how stupid I was. Tracers attract a lot of unwanted attention.

Even more incredible is the shot that Sgt. Carlos Hathcock made at a Vietnamese sniper. Hathcock saw a glitter in the distance and aimed at the glitter. The round passed through the NVA sniper's scope and through his brain. Hathcock recovered the sniper's rifle and turned it in for storage as a war trophy. When he left country, he went to claim his war trophy and discovered some low life Marine had stolen it from storage.