> dropped off oil well perforating guns at Yellow Freight
Holy fuck. We never shipped these using commercial couriers, but transported them using company trucks and company labor. We'd also have a heavily armed security person escorting them at all times.
For reference, these are long tubes containing many shaped charges. Sometimes you can have hundreds or thousands of shaped charges for a single perforation job. AFAIK, the oil field is the only industry that uses shaped charges outside of the military. Their primary application is piercing tank and ship armor. They kind of "implode" rather than "explode", and generate a sort of lightsaber-beam of superheated copper that lances straight through armor. In this video[0], blue is just a steel casing, yellow is the explosive, and red is the copper which pierces the target.
> Holy fuck. We never shipped these using commercial couriers, but transported them using company trucks and company labor. We'd also have a heavily armed security person escorting them at all times.
The manufacturer shipped them to us via Yellow, so we figured it was the simplest route to return the unused items via the same route, since they're properly credentialed and insured and all. It was a specialty project (perforating the casing in a newly drilled geothermal well at depths not more than 100m) so we only used in the realm of a dozen 50# cases of loose perforating guns and built the strings ourselves, bringing the high explosives (det cord that made up the string, detonators) from our own magazines.
> AFAIK, the oil field is the only industry that uses shaped charges outside of the military. Their primary application is piercing tank and ship armor.
They're quite often used in demolition as well, to shear through structural steel members. I've used them to bring down warehouses, bridge decks, bridge piers/supports, assorted industrial buildings and even hand built some crude shaped charges when scuttling a ship. I once went down a fun rabbit hole ordering custom built linear shaped charges for a demo project that saw the LSC's used so deep underwater that the static water pressure in the cavity of the charge would prevent the penetrator from forming properly. It was an interesting iterative design process with the manufacturer to make a sealed unit that maintained an air pocket inside the device at those depths and would seal flat agaisnt the object to be demolished. All akin to military uses sure (especially that last one, i bet the SEALS or some branch of frogmen have underwater satchel charges or limpet mines handy but those weren't available to us) but this was in the civilian construction domain.
Holy fuck. We never shipped these using commercial couriers, but transported them using company trucks and company labor. We'd also have a heavily armed security person escorting them at all times.
For reference, these are long tubes containing many shaped charges. Sometimes you can have hundreds or thousands of shaped charges for a single perforation job. AFAIK, the oil field is the only industry that uses shaped charges outside of the military. Their primary application is piercing tank and ship armor. They kind of "implode" rather than "explode", and generate a sort of lightsaber-beam of superheated copper that lances straight through armor. In this video[0], blue is just a steel casing, yellow is the explosive, and red is the copper which pierces the target.
Not a good thing to "go missing".
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoetLNb1Fc4