Personal
When I first became interested in weapons, I always had a pre-determined notion about how they functioned. I had imagined that each mechanism was straightforward: guns would just shoot out a bullet which would penetrate the target, while explosives would just blow up and kill the target in a fiery ball of destruction. However, after watching a television program about military weaponry, I was forced to change my view of how these weapons worked.
The best example of my paradigm shift in weapons was with the RPG-7. Originally I believed that once the warhead hit its target, it would explode and create a giant aperture in the structure; the explosion would obliterate everything, including any people inside. This was how I perceived it to function every time I saw it used in video games and such. However, the actual mechanism is slightly different. Instead, the warhead is lined with a conical sheet of copper with an explosive charge placed behind it. When the RPG is fired the warhead first hits the wall with the primary charge, creating a small hole for the secondary mechanism. Another detonator then activates, melting the conical liner into a heated jet of molten copper which enters the aperture and kills anyone inside the objective.
Although the paradigm shift does not affect me in any significant way, I was slightly disappointed that explosives do not work the way I thought they would (i.e. shock waves are the primary reason for explosives' effectiveness, not flames and whatnot). However, these new mechanisms piqued my interest in how these weapons worked and led me to read up on them a bit more.
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| Diagram of an RPG-7: Cone of molten copper fires out of the tip of the warhead, flowing through the hole made by the initial explosive charge and killing everyone inside the vehicle, structure, etc. |
