Have you ever thought of some off-the-wall question or comment, and wondered where you could post it without making a fool of yourself?
If so, this thread is for you.
A lot of the stuff that pops into our heads might make good conversation, but just doesn’t fit anywhere in a forex forum. And even the Melting Pot Forum might not be suitable — if you have to start a whole new thread just to make some comment that others might find “lame”.
I decided to call this thread “Stuff”, rather than “Trivia”, because — who knows? — some really profound “stuff” which is anything but trivial might pop up here. We do have some interesting and knowledgeable people on this Forum — people with education and expertise in all sorts of areas besides currency trading. There’s just no telling what they might want to talk about.
It’s all fair game. Just keep it reasonably clean, and reasonably respectful.
I’ll start. This is a question for any physics or ballistics experts out there:
One of my firearms is a 12-ga. shotgun. The indoor range where I practice from time to time requires those firing shotguns to use slugs, rather than buckshot or birdshot. So, I use 2¾" shot-shells with lead slugs, which have the following specs: slug weight 1 ounce (= 437.5 grains), and muzzle velocity 1,600 ft/sec. (which, for the curious, is almost 1,100 mph).
Obviously, as a slug travels down the barrel of the gun, it is accelerated from rest (0 ft/sec) to muzzle velocity (1,600 ft/sec) within the length of the barrel, surpassing the speed of sound (1,126 ft/sec) at some point inside the gun barrel.
So, my question is this: Does the slug generate a “sonic boom” when it “breaks the sound barrier”? If so, does that occur inside the gun barrel, or at the muzzle when the slug emerges into the surrounding air?
Just a totally useless piece of information that I’ve wondered about.
While we’re shooting large holes in silhouette targets, here’s another ballistics question.
Is kinetic energy the correct metric to use in comparing the hitting power of two different slugs? Example: I have a small .32-cal. pistol which fires a 71-grain bullet with a muzzle velocity of 905 ft/sec. If I do kinetic energy calculations for the .32-cal slug, and the 12-ga. slug, I come up with 129 ft-lb for the pistol, and 2,487 ft-lb for the shotgun (19 times the kinetic energy of the pistol slug).
Is this the right way to measure “hitting power”?
Is this the right way to measure recoil? In other words, is hitting power (at the business end of the gun) numerically the same as “kick” at my end?
If my shoulder could talk, it would definitely say that the shotgun has at least 19 times as much “kick” as that little pistol.
Okay, all the targets are full of holes now.
So, while I await answers from the physics community, we can move on to other topics and talk about whatever interests you.
