Steve Schear <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >I seem to recall that with sufficient knowledge and commonly available >detonators shaped explosive charges can be configured to hurl heavy >explosive payloads, much like a mortar, with fair accuracy, great distance >or very high velocity. I can't seem to find the reference on-line but I >vaguely recall that a 50kg payload could be accelerated to multi-mach >speeds with a device that could be placed in a car trunk. A poor man's >howitzer.
It sounds like you're talking about explosively formed projectiles (EFPs), which are a means of creating high-velocity (several km/s) light projectiles, chiefly useful for armour penetration. Because of the way it works, it can't "hurl heavy explosive payloads" (neither heavy, not explosive). It's been around for awhile, but the first technology demonstrators didn't surface until the 1980s (Germany and France), and it's only starting to be adopted now (very tricky technology to get right). The RAF used an EFP in 1989 to assassinate the chairman of Deutsche Bank (it's typically reported as being "a car bomb", but was actually done by parking a pushbike with a small bag on the back next to the road where the car was to pass. The projectile punched through the side of his armoured limo and killed him, but left everyone else alive. This is one of those feats which, if you had asked experts in 1989, would have told you was impossible to do). Peter.
