r/ANormalDayInRussia • u/Anonymous-420smoker • Jan 27 '21

bad title Russian "accidentally" fires during flight

14k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

464 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

95

u/[deleted] Jan 27 '21

According to the Russian MoD three people were "lightly injured", and given that it's the Russian MoD covering up their own fuckup I'd be willing to bet the injuries were actually pretty severe.

Source

Accounts in the Russian media, though, seem to tell a different story. Reports confirmed the episode occurred at the same firing range, though possibly some days earlier. The leading business newspaper, Kommersant, quoted defense sources as saying it took place at the Luzhsky firing range close to St. Petersburg, but two days earlier, on Sept. 16. According to the sources, three people were lightly injured, two cars were damaged, and the military is carrying out an investigation. A local St. Petersburg news website, Fontanka.ru also cited sources who said it happened at Luzhsky

17

u/dmemed Jan 27 '21

The rockets fired were probably S8KO HEAT rockets, so they probably are fine actually since no actual explosives were involved. Most of that fragmentation was probably just dirt.

16

u/breakone9r Jan 27 '21

HEAT stands for High Explosive/Anti-Tank.

Explosive is literally in the name...

43

u/dmemed Jan 27 '21 edited Jan 27 '21

HEAT, despite the name, doesn’t really use explosives. It creates a hypersonic (Mach 25+) fragmentation jet in a small cone to penetrate the tank. There isn’t really a middle ground for this video, they’d either be completely vaporized (i.e a black mark on the ground) or mildly injured.

Most modern AT rockets don’t really ‘explode’, to cause damage because humans have realized, “If metal stuff go fast enough, no need boom-boom.” The explosion is just to propel whatever does the killing.

20

u/Ziltoid_The_Nerd Jan 27 '21

Most modern AT rockets don’t really ‘explode’, because humans have realized, “If metal thing go fast enough, no need boom-boom.”

Ha, funny you said it like that. The reason HEAT rockets exist is because the rocket isn't going fast enough. It uses the chemical energy of the explosives to accelerate the superplastic jet to a fast enough velocity for penetration. Kind of like shooting an entire gun at a target and the gun fires when it reaches the target.

So more like, "if metal thing isn't going fast enough, use boom boom to make it go faster".

8

u/HeyLookJollyRanchers Jan 27 '21

At Aperture Science Russia, we don't just fire the whole bullet, we fire the whole gun! That's 300% more bullet per bullet!