Much as I hate to defend Star Trek, some not very correct assumptions are being made here.
Stark wrote:
The best part for me is that the crystal is BLUNT. Best penetrator ever, and the internal luminence makes it seem quite low mass too. Low mass, low speed, blunt...
Doesn’t matter if its blunt, most large armor piercing projectiles are blunt, because with so much mass behind them a point would crush on impact points also happens to make a ricochet more likely. Specialist concrete piercing projectiles and bombs actually have almost completely flat heads as this gives the very best results in that kind of material.
Just take a look at this
16in shell. Notice the not very sharp looking shell body, and especially the flat headed AP cap. Only the hollow windscreen is actually pointy.
Darth Wong wrote:You have to love the way the warhead cone was not deformed by the impact at all, so they could open an access panel as if it came fresh off the assembly line.
In WW2 more then one ship was hit by a dud armor piercing capped shell, which lodged inside the ship and then had its base fuse
unscrewed to render it safe. I don’t know if a round ever pierced armor and then had this operation performed, but it’s certainly within the realm of possibility. Armor piercing shells had to be exceptional ridge under immense shocks, any deformation could induce an explosion in the bursting charge before the shell finished piercing the armor plate, or it might disable the delay action fuse thus preventing a detonation at all. This is why you add an armor piercing cap to many kinds of AP projectiles. The cap gets smashed, but the separate piece of metal that is the projectile body survives.
Do we ever see the nose of this thing before it hits to see if it has an armor piercing cap?
Darth Wong wrote:Obviously, 36 km/h isn't high velocity for a bullet, but it's plenty of speed for a relatively massive object which experiences no deformation after coming to a sudden stop after punching through a solid wall.
Here’s what happens to a high explosive shell (no cap here) weighing 148kg after it comes to a stop from 500mps via impacts on the hull plating and internal bulkheads of battleship USS Teaxs in 1944. As you can see; not much.
Real life naval torpedoes have very considerable kinetic energy, though they are faster then a mere 36kph. In his book Japanese Destroyer Captain, Tameichi Hara recounted how an American 21in torpedo left a neat round 21in hole in his ships rudder (one of the strongest underwater parts of a ship) in one engagement. In other cases ships are known to have sank from the damage caused by dud torpedo hits, though this was not typical.
As for battle ranges, Star Trek typically underestimates ranges even by WW2 naval standards. In many cases its more like the ranges WW2 tanks fought at.
"This cult of special forces is as sensible as to form a Royal Corps of Tree Climbers and say that no soldier who does not wear its green hat with a bunch of oak leaves stuck in it should be expected to climb a tree"
— Field Marshal William Slim 1956