hi wrote:You would have to have something that supported all around it, basically a custom vise that is made specifically for holding a dime. if you did that, then yes, i would bet you could do it. other wise, my guess is you are just going to bend it and have some really nice dings, but no penetration.
The description on one of the photobucket pictures details how I did it. For higher impact energies, that assembly could have been made with a thicker washer and clamped in a vise. With higher impact speeds, I expect that the hole would be made before the dime could deform very much.
hi wrote: your talking about something that shoots almost a mile per second... I am a pretty big gun nut and i can honestly say that i dont know of a single commercially available rifle out there that shoots at 5000 fps... im not saying that it can't be done, but if solid propellants have trouble with that, then i haven't a clue what you are going to do.
Direct your attention toward the Rheinmetall 120mm L/55. Smaller rifles shoot much heavier projectiles in relation to their bore, cutting down the muzzle speeds they achieve. We see that in spudding as well - cast lead rounds are much more common for plinkers than they are for 3" bore pneumatics. Also, there are alternative methods of using chemical energy for propulsion...
Speaking of which, one new rule: the airsoft round must be shot at the dime, not the other way around
A 0.20g BB at 1.5km/s would have a very good chance at making a hole.
The capacitor used for my shot was 16uF, charged to 7.5kV.
Edit:
Ragnarok wrote:DYI is using a plasma, with a much higher specific energy, and thus with a much higher speed of sound. Plasmas can have temperatures of millions of degrees C (indeed, temperatures of billions of C have been achieved) - but for practical purposes here, we're talking about a few tens of thousands degrees C.
This places it as about an order of magnitude hotter than propane flames, and thus with a speed of sound into multiple kilometres a second.
That's not quite correct - I'm using plasma to vaporise a propellant (water, in this case). The resulting propellant gas (a mixture containing mostly steam, dihydrogen, and dioxygen) is much cooler than the initial plasma. The best estimate I have of the SOS in the chamber is between 1600m/s (worst case - mostly steam, 4000K) and 4000m/s (complete dissociation into atomic species, 8000K, definitely not happening here), probably closer to 1600. It is, of course, much easier to vary the SOS in an ETG than it is in any other gas expansion based launcher - use less propellant, and it gets hotter.
Spudfiles' resident expert on all things that sail through the air at improbable speeds, trailing an incandescent wake of ionized air, dissociated polymers and metal oxides.