Ok i just got through with a heated debate about this question. My friend is claiming that a modern cannon ball. i argued with him what a modern cannon was still unsure tried to compare it to a civil war and i found that it goes half the speed of a musket rifle and then hes like well with today’s standards, still unclear. anyway i tried to explain that the amount of force required to move a cannon ball is substantially more then a bullet he still is thick as a brick.
I can’t find anywhere what the speed of a cannon ball is except that one, so that is just not enough. a .45 cal bullet goes 250 miles per second.
I tried to get him to explain his logic but he was like i watched a cannon ball fly out of the cannon i just know it goes faster then a .45 bullet.
I pretty sure im right but just in case i figured id get the opinion of the tons of people here on yahoo answers, this probably still wouldn’t be enough to sway him.
Anyway i’m extremely pissed off that hes so thick so please someone who knows what there talking about or who could find valid evidence please explain.
lol i found a link that said theoretically a cannon ball could go mach 34 and that was just like fuel for the fire and then i had to explain to him what theoretical means.
Ok and if you don’t know for sure just tell me what you think so i can have some other opinions for back up.
My intuition, as well, was that a bullet would be faster. But I looked up a number of different bullets on Wikipedia, and assuming they’re right, you unfortunately chose a slower bullet (big fat handgun bullet, rather than lean, fast sniper rifle). Wikipedia says the .45 goes up to 404m/s. Thats meters per second, not miles per second. If things were going miles per second, they would vaporize in the atmosphere like a meteor. For comparison, a 30-06 rifle goes up to 880 m/s, and a 300 Winchester Magnum sniper round goes up to 930m/s.
Now to cannons. There are lots of them–where do we begin? I just looked up a few: The M2 75mm cannon: 588m/s; M198-155mm howitzer: 660m/s, and the amazing Paris gun: 1600m/s (that is 1.0 miles per second, and I think that was one of the biggest gun/cannons ever built). So then I looked for an old, short, stubby howitzer that might be slower–how about the Ordnance BL 6 inch 26cwt howitzer at 430m/s. That’s just around a .45 muzzle velocity. I’m sure if we look further, we’ll find an old, stubby cannon that shoots even slower.
So there are some cannons that have a lower muzzle velocity compared to some guns, but I could not find any “cannons” slower than the .45 caliber. I could also not find any guns faster than the Paris Gun cannon. I did not look up civil war cannons, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them were slower than a .45. NASA is working on a cannon that would shoot small sattelites into orbit. If they ever get that to work, it would put all muzzle velocities of all previous guns and cannons to shame–it might be measured in miles per second.
Tell your friend, just because there is a big explosion inside the cannon doesn’t mean that it going to launch the cannon ball at light speed. A modern day gun can go faster than any cannon.