Threat data base - Technical performance

Authors:

  • Mats Hartmann

Publish date: 2009-01-08

Report number: FOI-R--2658--SE

Pages: 47

Written in: Swedish

Keywords:

  • threat
  • ammunition
  • small arms ammunition
  • FSP
  • technical performance
  • V50
  • warhead
  • protection
  • ballistic limit

Abstract

Knowing the technical performance of warheads that are potential threats to Swedish forces is important for many reasons, e.g. to be able to systematise the threats. An other reason is that it gives the opportunity to create a spectrum of threat levels. By using the spectrum one can then choose the appropriate protection level which can be used as specification of requirements for new platforms but also for adjusting existing material to suit it for the relevant threat environment. The threat database is meant to compile experimentally developed and theoretically/statistically evaluated data of performance for different kinds of ammunition. In this first edition the plan on how to publish the information is presented and the tool to create the structure for the database report is briefly described. It is of high importance that the information contained in the database is kept up to date for a long period of time since it is common that different kinds of ammunition is used in different parts of the world for decades, so the risk of information getting obsolete is small. It is equally important to continuously add new information about ammunition types that are found and possible to test. When applicable, information rendered by other organisations will also be added. When conducting experiment to test for example small arms ammunition, focus has to be put on several factors such as the correct identification of both ammunition and target material, the quality of the test results and securing that the projectile's yaw angle at impact is not too large. FOI is currently building a testing site to enable these kinds of experiment. To the highest possible extent, all input has been saved as text files since both the amount and type of data will display great variation between the tested types of ammunition and since data is meant to be accessible for a long time. Today these are read by a MATLAB programme that evaluates V50 and delivers the results with text, tables and graphs as a report manuscript. An alternative solution to the MATLAB programme and the text files could be a commercial database manager, though that might increase the risk of insufficient compatibility between different versions, difficulties to evaluate the experimental results and input saved as binary, unreadable data. An example based on open input on how the database might look like is given, where a number of experimental results are displayed that have been evaluated with the MATLAB programme. These results are presented with text, tables and graphs. The study shows that the method using text files as input to a combined managing- and report generating tool works. It also points out several areas with development potential.