Quote:
Originally Posted by Alpo
It's been a long time since I read Jackel, but I don't believe it was fulminate of Mercury. I think it was just the liquid metal. You have a little drop of Mercury, which is very heavy, inside the cavity. You fire the gun the bullet goes forward, and Newton's law of motion makes the Mercury go to the back of the cavity, where it stays as long as the bullet is going forward. When the bullet hits something, and stops going forward, Newton's law of motion makes the Mercury go charging forward where it blows the whole front of the bullet apart.
I'm pretty sure that's how the exploding bullets in Jackal worked.
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You may be right about that. It's been around 50 years since I read The Day of the Jackal, so my memory about the details of the Jackal's "exploding bullets" may be wrong. Maybe my "research" on the feasibility of the mercury bullets lead me to learning about fulminated mercury. Its been a LONG time so the details are a bit fuzzy.
But my point is still that logic would dictate that anything unstable enough to make a bullet actually explode on impact would also stand a good chance of being too unstable to withstand the equally violent forces of an accelerating bullet.
That seems like simple physics to me. Certainly not something I have ever been willing to put to the test.
FWIW, I also have to wonder if even something as semi-inert as plain old mercury slamming into the rear of the bullet cavity could possibly exert enough force to blow out the back of the bullet, cause the bullet to fragment, or maybe even cause the bullet diameter to balloon to the point that it would stick in the barrel.
Just my random thoughts...