Hey Van,

Quote Originally Posted by Van View Post
And then a solder arrived in my unit, who had left Rwanda with her family during their troubles ten years back...
As Tom so eloquently put it, the machete is Africa's neutron bomb. And, as one of Tom's NCOs put it, the machete doesn't click on empty

Quote Originally Posted by Van View Post
This bears thinking about, but back to EFPs.

If I'm understanding it correctly, you have a carefully machined (would stamped work?) copper disk, a tube, high explosive (mach 6 projectile velocities were mentioned in one article; sounds like an RDX based explosive, SEMTEX or some such), a blasting cap, and the complicated bit that could be anything from wire and a battery to something involving a cellphone or some other electronic widget. Concealment materials added as needed and can range from improvised to sophisticated.

At the most basic level, it seems to me that the choke points are the copper disks and blasting caps. The tolerances of that disk and the tube can't be that high, but the shape of the copper disc requires some extra knowledge.
You're right on target, very few are precisely machined shape charges. There has to be a sufficient amount of room for expansion, or the 'tube' will merely explode before the copper disk begins it's hypervelocity adventure. Using RDX-based high explosives will also result in a tube fracture. Most of our home-made shape charges use small amounts of TNT with a detonator and wooden or rubber plug. A fairly stone-age looking shape charge travels at mach 8 and penetrates up to 10 times its diameter (our 25mm shape charges go through 5 inches of solid steel with a 7 inch stand off). However, this requires an extreme amount of accuracy using a laser to aim and the target cannot be moving. By no means high tech, and most of the data used for home-made shape charges comes from the late 60s.

Quote Originally Posted by Van View Post
I'm mostly thinking out loud and trying to better understand what is being said in the media, thanks for your forebearance and sharing your expertise.
There are few in the Ordnance field that would talk to a journalist...even if you paid them to do so. Conversely, I doubt there are any starving journalist with EOD backgrounds

Regards, Stan