I saw this in my Twitter feed:

Jill Biden Is Bringing Texas Woman Who Almost Died from Miscarriage to State of the Union https://t.co/BosexrcPKx pic.twitter.com/V9BssNAmIT

— Jezebel (@Jezebel) February 7, 2023

That seems like something bullshit, so I read the article.

In August, Amanda’s water broke when she was 18 weeks pregnant, long before a fetus can survive outside the uterus. But doctors didn’t intervene in her miscarriage because the treatment is an abortion, which the state had outlawed. They sent her home to watch for signs of infection, including sepsis. Three days later her fever spiked to 103 degrees and the hospital decided she was now sick enough to be induced (which is considered an abortion when done before viability). But hours after the procedure, and even with antibiotics, her infection got worse. She developed symptoms of sepsis and was moved to the ICU, and her family members were preparing to say their goodbyes. Zurawski survived, but the infection scarred her uterus, and it’s not clear if she will be able to conceive again.

Even the ACLU of Texas acknowledges that:

Texas bans abortions at all stages of pregnancy, unless you have a life-threatening medical emergency.

I’m not a medical doctor, but it seems like a miscarriage that would lead to a life threatening infection is exactly the type of medical emergency that is exempted by the Texas law.

Malicious Compliance is defined as:

Malicious compliance is the behavior of strictly following the orders of a superior despite knowing that compliance with the orders will have an unintended or negative result.

So, I have to ask…

Did these doctors deliberately give this woman bad medical care to maliciously comply with the state’s abortion law for the purposes of creating a martyr for their cause?

Pre-COVID that might seem utterly insane.

After COVID, with just how political and partisan and distrustful the medical establishment has proven to be, I don’t know.

Would doctors harm patients for political credit?

Some are mutilating children’s bodies in the advancement of the Transgender movement.

So who the fuck knows.

But it doesn’t seem outside the realm of possibilities.

According to a CBS poll, 70% of Americans are pessimistic about the state of the country.

A Gallup poll has 80% of Americans pessimistic about the state of the economy.

The labor force participation rate is holding at the lowest it’s been since we started measuring it.

Everything is more expensive and people have lost real buying power from their money.

According to Biden last night, everything is coming up roses and he’s the best President in history.

Social media has “Dark Biden” trending, because apparently Biden is a badass.

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it … And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable…what then?”

Welcome to 1984 2023, where your eyes and your wallet lie to you, and The Party is always right.

From last night’s State of the Union Address:

"Ban assault weapons now! Ban them now! Once and for all."

President Biden acknowledged Brandon Tsay, the 26-year-old who wrestled a gun away from the shooter in Monterey Park, California, and urged Congress to ban assault weapons during #SOTU2023 pic.twitter.com/49V9Iws3A9

— CBS News (@CBSNews) February 8, 2023

This on the heels of the pistol brace ban is going to drive everything to a head.

It’s time that the Supreme Court finally tackle the issue of assault weapons and possibly the NFA with it.

After Bruen, I’m confident that such a decision will rule in our favor.

But it’s time to stop beating around the bush and knock this shit out once and for all.

In my last post on shaped charges, I was asked in the comments about explosive welding.  Why not?

Explosive welding is also known as explosive cladding.  It is a process by which a cladding material is explosively bonded to a backing material.

Why do it?  Besides that blowing shit up is cool as fuck.

Cladding is a process in which a layer of some material with desirable properties is laid over and bonded to a structural substrate.

People are often familiar with this as hardfacing.  A steel member, like an auger blade, die, teeth on an excavator, etc., is welded over with a hard, wear-resistant surface material.

Cladding is often done for corrosion resistance.  I was first introduced to is with alkalizer units in a refinery, which use almost pure sulfuric or hydrofluoric acid.  The tank is lined with tantalum.  Tantalum is very expensive, so it is clad onto steel which makes up the structural component of the pressure vessel.

Cladding is much thicker than plating, which is put on as an electrochemical process.  Platings are thin and do contain porosity.  For very harsh chemical environments, platings are insufficient to protect the substrate material.  This is where cladding comes in.

Quite often cladding is applied with a welder.  God only knows how many miles of hardface cladding I put on with SMAW when I was learning to weld.  Just facing conveyor rollers for a cement plant building up hours with a torch.

But there are times when that cannot be done.  The metals cannot be welded together for a variety or reasons.  Sometimes the two metals form brittle intermetallics, such as aluminum and steel. With tantalum, the melting temperature of tantalum is higher than the vaporization temperature of steel, so tantalum cannot be welded to the steel with fusion welding.

Explosive welding is a solid-state process that bonds the materials together mechanically.  There is no alloying of the two metals.

The metal to be clad is called the flyer plate.  It is placed over the base plate with small plastic pucks that give it a standoff distance.

The flyer plate is backed with explosives, and a detonator is placed in one corner.  The shockwave drives the flyer plate into the base plate, starting at that corner and radiating outward.

This is very similar to how a shaped charge works.  When the metal plates impact at thousands of meters per second, that same thin shear layer forms, and any surface impurities, oxides, and contaminates squirt out from between the plates as a jet.

The material softened by the impact but not squirted out as a jet ripple against one another and lock mechanically with what looks like ocean waves and hook together like Velcro.

The clad plate can then be assembled into a structure.

This process allows very dissimilar metals to be permanently bonded together without issues associated with the fusion welding of dissimilar metals.

The downside is you can only do large flat sheets.  It’s not a process that is conducive to complex geometries.

Usually, explosives are used for blowing things apart, but every once in a while they can be used to blow things together.

Also, because blowing shit up is cool as fuck.

–

Update:

Yes, the clad plate can be roll formed like other plates.

To make a tank, the plates are aligned and butt-welded together.  The steel backing plate can be welded to other steel backing plates on the back and the cladding is welded to other cladding on the front.

The welding is done a little more shallow to prevent the weldpool from penetrating through one layer into the next.

I should also add, this is where advanced knowledge of explosives it key.

Explosive welding is best done with low velocity explosives like ANFO, where shaped charges are best made with high velocity explosives like RDX and PETN.

The speed of the detonation and shockwave affects the thickness of that shear jetting layer.

A high velocity explosive will create a larger jet, great for armor piercing.

A low velocity explosive will create enough jet to clean the plates but will bond the together.

If you tried to explosive welding two plates with Comp B or Semtex,you won’t get a good plate but a huge shape charge.

I’ve been working on a project for several months, that is going to turn into a post, hopefully in about a week or so.  I’m looking forward to publishing the final results.

As I gear up for it, I was thinking about other work I have done in this area and wanted to share some of that with you.

I don’t have much in the way of impressive skills.  I’m not an artist or a musician.  I can’t dance.  My writing sucks.

What I am, though, is an extremely good metallurgist.  And a bit of a sick evil fuck.  That makes for an interesting combination.

What I am exceptionally good at is using metallurgy to kill things better.

Once upon a time, I was classified by the DOD as an “enhanced lethality engineer.”  I really wish I had gotten business cards with that printed on them.

Here was the nature of that job.

Let’s say you have a missile system, like the TOW or Javlin.

It exists and has existed for a while.  There are (or were) many in inventory.  Soldiers have been trained on them.  There is an entire production infrastructure that exists to make them.

But they are not as effective as they once were on the newest generation of armored vehicles.

Rather than scrap them, my job was to improve the warhead, so that existing systems could be upgraded to be more effective.

I enhanced the lethality of an existing system, hence, I was an enhanced lethality engineer.

This type of system upgrade happens all the time.  Guidance improvements for accuracy, rocket improvements for range and speed, etc.

I did warheads.

The explosive physics of a shaped charge is not terribly complicated.

There is a cone of metal backed by a charge of explosives.  The explosive detonates.  That sends a shockwave into the back of the cone at a speed of 8,000+ meters per second.  The cone collapses.  As the walls of the cone impact each other, the material at the inner surface of that cone experiences forces in the range of tens and hundreds of gigapascals.  That much pressure causes the metal to undergo shear and act like a liquid.  It literally squirts out of the cone, sort of like how you can shoot a watermelon seed from between your fingertips by squeezing it.

The front of that jet is moving at about 12 kilometers per second.  The back of the jet at about 6 kilometers per second.

The jet takes a short distance to form, which is your optimal standoff distance for the warhead.

Only the inner layer of the cone forms the jet, the rest of the cone becomes a slug and travels behind the jet at about 3 to 4 kilometers per second.

When the fully formed jet hits the target, it erodes it, like a water jet cutter.  When you were a kid, did you ever squirt a hole into the dirt with the jet nozzle on a garden hose?  Same thing.

The penetration of the jet is a function of the length of the jet and the relative densities of the jet and the armor.  If you wondered why some tanks use depleted uranium armor, this is why.  No metal is strong enough to resist impact at velocities of 12 kilometers per second and tens of gigapascals of force, so you just use the densest material you can to limit the depth of jet penetration.

The length of the jet is determined by the diameter and angle of the cone.  The optimal angle for a deep penetrating jet is 42°.  The diameter is limited by the size of the missile.

All you can do is play with the density of the metallic liner.

Typically, the liner is copper.  Copper has a higher density than steel and is very ductile.  The liner material has to be ductile, or the liner will shatter and not form a good jet.

The amount of precision that goes into making shaped charge liners is very high.  Tolerances in the tenths of thousands of an inch.  Little imperfections alter how the jet forms and reduce its penetrating capacity.  Military shaped charge liners are very expensive.

As an aside, the shaped charge liner design for perforating charges in oil and gas is different.  In a military setting, you only get one shot to kill a tank.  If you don’t it will shoot back.  In oil and gas, rocks don’t shoot back.  You use lots of charges to perf a rock so shaped charge liners have to be cheaper to be cost-effective.  Oil and gas love powder metal liners because they are less ductile and the slug breaks up and doesn’t plug the perf hole.

One of the metals that makes better liners is molybdenum.  It’s more dense than copper and forms a jet very well.  The problem is, it doesn’t deep draw easily like copper does, so making liners is harder.

I started out on an additive manufacturing process that created full-density moly liners that had the metallurgical properties to make good jets.  There is a lot of metallurgy, grain size, orientation, etc, that affects jet formation and we wanted to optimize for that.

But then I got to thinking.

We know that only the inner layer of the cone forms a jet and the rest forms a slug.

You need the cone to have a certain thickness, if you try to make it thinner so that only that jet-forming layer is there, it won’t form a jet.  The backing layer of the cone is what drives the jet formation.

The good news is that we know just how thick that jet-forming layer is.

So, what can we do?

I made a bi-metallic liner.

The inner layer was jet-forming molybdenum.

What to make the driving layer from?

How about zirconium?  It bonds well to molybdenum so you don’t get delamination during jet formation.  It can be applied with the same additive manufacturing process as the moly.

Oh yeah, and it’s pyrophoric and burns at a few thousand degrees in air.

When the charge goes off, the bi-metallic cone collapses.  The molybdenum inner layer shears and turns into a jet at 12 kilometers per second and erodes a hole through the armor.  The zirconium slug traveling behind hits the hole made by the moly jet.  The zirconium slug sheers through the hole and comes out the other side having been adiabatically heated to a few hundred degrees.

The hot zirconium exits the hole into the crew compartment of the armored target and ignites, spraying everywhere.

I just punched a hole through the side of your armored vehicle with a hypersonic jet of molten metal and then sprayed your crew, your ammo, and your fuel with 3,000° burning metal with three times the muzzle velocity of a 5.56.

Why?

Because it was fucking fun to design this shit and set it off.

The word engineer means “one who builds engines.”

The word engine, in its origin, meant a siege engine, a machine for breaching fortifications.

Metallurgy is the oldest form of science.  It is what made us take that first step from using the materials we found around us in the Stone Age to making the materials we needed with smelting in the Bronze Age.  All of civilization became possible when we started making metal tools.

I embrace the roots of my field.

I am a metallurgical engineer.

I use my knowledge of metal to build more effective machines for breaching fortifications.

Better killing through metallurgy.

This is apparently from reboot of a Disney show.

I could go on and on about how wrong this whole thing is, but I’m not going to waste the time.

The one thing I do want to point out is this:

Making the one white girl stand silently and hold up a demeaning sign of her guilt for some crime she never committed.

That picture really reminds me if this:

Racial struggle sessions.

That’s where we’re headed, and they are leading our children to that.

Nope, fuck that noise.

I hope DeSantis turns Disney into a parking lot.

You can call Jews Nazis and say Israel is an apartheid state, but they won’t let you call Palestinians terrorists.

That’s just too hateful for Twitter.