I hope he is not okay
I’m surprised they used beads instead of something with a straight/ ragged edge.
If he bled out after the hit, he’s just a body. A less deadly injury creates more soldiers rolling around in pain waiting for their turn to get every bead picked out.
the reason for this is improved aerodynamics. when you can’t control which way a given piece of metal faces, balls offer the least drag of all shapes. this is also reason for why tungsten is used in the first place
That was the main thing I was thinking. Predictable spread.
that’s one thing, but another thing is that just after some few 10s of meters some fragmentation loses serious % of energy. you can counteract this by making it heavier, but then there’s less of them (or use denser material, like tungsten instead of steel). it’s also shape dependent. when distance is small anyway, like with SAM, this matters less and some kind of shape filling entire available space is used (like cubes)
I’m waiting for someone else to chime in but I don’t think these injuries are from cluster bomblettes. These look closer to what a M30A1 rocket would do, which carry 130,000 tiny tungsten bbs.
Is this from the DPICMs? I thought the bomblettes produced shrapnel, I don’t think they had beads.
There is a HIMARS munition that is supposed to be a replacement to cluster munitions and it is composed of tungsten beads like the size seen here.
You’re definitely right. These look like tungsten beads.
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![[NSFL] Injuries to a Russian soldier, presumably from a GLMRS M30A1 rocket with a tungsten bead warhead.](https://i.imgur.com/hcpH5Mm.png){kind=link}