Sexy Jihad

Forget the fastest gun in the west, these guys have made the fastest gun in the world:

Imagine a gun sending bullets at 34 kilometers per second, faster than Earth moves through space. This is the new speed record recently broken by the Z machine at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL). With this machine, Sandia researchers have “accelerated a small plate from zero to 76,000 mph in less than a second.” But not for long: their bullets are very small aluminum plates — only 30 mm by 15 mm in cross-section, and 850 microns thick. And the “bullets” don’t go very far. They can strike their targets after only five millimeters, but their impacts create incredible shock waves, reaching up to 15 million times the atmospheric pressure. Among other things, the researchers hope that their machine will help them to stabilize the U.S. nuclear stockpile without having to explode a nuclear weapon or to better understand what’s inside Saturn and Jupiter. Read more…

Here are the opening paragraphs of the SNL news release.

Sandia National Labs has accelerated a small plate from zero to 76,000 mph in less than a second.

The speed of the thrust was a new record for Sandia’s Z Machine — sometimes referred to as the fastest gun in the West. Actually the fastest in the world, it is now able to propel small plates at 34 kilometers a second, faster than the 30 km/sec that Earth travels through space in its orbit about the sun, 50 times faster than a rifle bullet, and three times the velocity needed to escape Earth’s gravitational field.

Damn that’s FAST. Even as a layman this stuff is just mind boggling to me. Shooting bullets faster than the earth!

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