cannon shell is tiny compared to 70 tons of locomotive. you need massive amount of energy to move such huge thing even a feet and your average 20mm cannoshell just does not have it. Think man.

Sounds like a boiler explosion to me. Pretty sweet that the DM for trains includes such a thing. Definitely not knocking a train over by the "weight of fire" though.

Anyone with a basic grasp of physics can tell you it just doesn't happen.

Please show the math that it isn't possible.

Go play pool, just replace the white ball with a tiny marble and see what happens. No need for an equation.

But if I throw 1000's of marbles at very velocities and are high exsplosive it's different

The math would not be all that bad, assuming certain simplifications. However it's quite unnecessary. Consider that a P-51 weighs about 9000 pounds. Now I have found that locomotives vary hugely in mass, but let's assume a 50 (imperial) ton locomotive, which is on the low end. That's 100 000 pounds.

The forces subjected on the locomotive cannot be more than the forces of recoil subjected on the aircraft. In fact since a great deal of energy will be expended by the bullets in puncturing the metal of the locomotive, it will in fact be much less, but the force of recoil is an extreme upper limit. If the energy in the bullets was sufficient to throw a train--weighing over 10 times as much as the aircraft--off its tracks then the aircraft would come to a dead stall after only a very short burst. Myths about the A-10 included, this is patently ridiculous.

Oh and of course this is just the locomotive itself, it becomes even more absurd if you consider the mass of the train cars.

Yes, but the plane has momentum flying forward which adds a lot to energy in the bullets. Come to think of it, most accounts I have read or seen on TV were pilots flying the P-47. Now if a massive Jug is in a transonic dive firing 1000's of .50 bullets from its 8 guns, that is a real wall of lead traveling at insane speeds. Now these pilots, who were there and saw with their own eyes say they knocked trains off the tracks I will believe them over some random guy on the web.

Damn good spot you found here.:-P


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v2...ws/7_3_112.gif

But I have to say, your bait is getting old.

Watch the loco in my sig, it is a rather medium one. Its weight is about 84 tons, without tender.

Bullets are not the main cause of a loc explosion.

Remember that the steam of a loc is caused through heatening the water inside of the boiler.
The water tries to expand, but can only through the vent for its cylinder.
You have 170-210°C by 12-16 bar inside the boiler.

Now you have a A/C firing on it. The bullets only put some holes in it.
But what cause the explosion is, that the hot pressurized water now can depressure to the point where it becomes steam.
And that steam begins to expand so fast, that it rips everyting apart.

For those who don't believe in science or math (there's no nobel prize for math) and only in moving pictures, there was an episode of "Mythbusters" where they overheated a normal house boiler. It went through the roof.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWnL8SipXT8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rXwc...eature=related