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Super Bainite Armor Steel
A new high-performance steel called Super Bainite has been developed in the U.K. to have outstanding ballistics properties and, in tests, it has performed better than 'normal' steel armor.
(Super Bainite, the new armor steel)
Combining drilling and hole-punching during the cooling process results in a ultra-high-hardness perforated plate. Professor Peter Brown, of the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, said:
"The ballistic performance of perforated Super Bainite steel armour is at least twice that of conventional rolled homogenous steel armour. This is because the introduction of perforations creates a large number of edges which disrupt the path of incoming projectiles, significantly reducing their potency."
In his 1969 tongue-in-cheek short story It was Nothing - Really!, Theodore Sturgeon wrote about a process by which materials could be made stronger by removing material. He called it Nothing:
... if, in these special cases, the substance becomes stronger when a small part of it is removed, it would seem logical to assume that if still more were removed, the substance would be stronger still. And carried to its logical conclusion, it would seem reasonable to hypothesize that by removing more and more material, the resulting substance would become stronger and stronger until at last we would produce a substance composed of nothing at all - which would be indestructible!...
...the little weapon went off with a short, explosive hiss. The little needle it threw disintegrated in midair. "There's a sheet of just plain Nothing between us and it's impenetrable."
Still holding his weapon, Mr. Brown rose and backed away - and brought up sharply against some Nothing behind him...
Via Defence News; thanks to Winchell Chung (aka @nyrath) at Project Rho.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 9/15/2011)
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