FACT FILE: Armor Piercing Bombs
Armor piercing munitions are those that have a hardened and
specially shaped casing, allowing them to penetrate concrete and other
fortifications. Their explosive charges are attached to detonators set
for delayed impact detonation, giving the bomb time to penetrate one or
more levels of the target before exploding inside. They come in the same
warhead ranges as LD gravity bombs and can be fitted with the same control
surfaces and seeker heads to turn them into "smart" bombs like
GBUs or guided CBUs.
Bomb Nomenclature
There is a very wide array of bombs available to the SFMC, but
they fall into general categories that each have there own designating
prefix for the bomb's nomenclature: LD (low drag), HD (high drag), GBU
(guided bomb unit), CBU (cluster bomb unit), AP (armor-piercing), FAE (fuel/air
explosive), M/A (matter/antimatter). The number that follows is particular
to the series of bombs in question and gets larger with the size of the
bomb's warhead. For example, HD-8500 designates a high drag (HD), high
explosive gravity bomb (8xxx series), with a 500kg warhead.
Some material on this page ruthlessly plagerized from the SFMC's Aerospace Branch Manual by Matt Kelley and available from SFMC Academy.
WebPage designed & maintained by Kevin "MAC" Nulty
