Artillery values

[Ricky B]

I believe the article is about a non-explosive projectile impacting a person's body, rather than a high explosive shell - I am thinking bullets primarily. It could also apply, potentially, to solid antitank rounds. To apply it to an artillery shell that explodes, it would really on the velocity of the shell fragments, which would have a velocity imparted by the explosive charge rather than the shell's velocity.

Frequently, due to this, howitzers actually had a larger quantity of explosives in the shell, while guns had lighter, thicker walled shells. This was due to the need for the guns firing at a higher velocity to increase the shell casing for strength, otherwise the shells couldn't handle the extra force of firing - both acceleration and gas pressure in the tube. I know for sure that the German 17cm guns were like this, and you can see it in PzC ratings (at least the original ones) where the 15.5 cm howitzers had higher SAs than these long range guns - in that case the guns had a much longer range as their shells were also lighter than the howitzers, to help the range, so they had very light charges in the shell.

I don't know enough about the US 155mms you mention, they used the same powder mechanism so I suspect the shells were the same also.