Design Criteria for Pellet-Dispersing Warheads

A warhead is presumed to be so designed as to provide a radial dispersion of small pellets without significantly altering their collective forward motion. Thus, at the moment of target interception, the pellets are taken as randomly distributed over either a circular or an elliptical lamina, and those distributions that lead to optimum target-kill probabilities are derived. Design criteria are noted that tend to yield the largest over-all kill probability. Target and lamina size, individual pellet mass, over-all mass, kill probability of a single pellet that hits the target, and the random errors of predicting target position and of placing the pellet array at that position are all taken into account. An assessment is made of the basic proposition that the kill probability of every pellet striking the target is the same, independent of the number of previous hits, thereby some “limits of applicability” are established for the present study. In conclusion, an adaptation of the mathematical results to a shotgun-bird system is presented.