in an expanding circle. The pressure wave from the explosive needs to act evenly on the rods over their length, so some sort of tamper is used to shape the shock wave similar to an explosive lens. The rods are sufficiently soft (ductile) to allow the expansion without breaking the rods or the welded joints, and the detonation velocity is limited to under 1,150 m/s, allowing the rods to bend at these locations instead. At some intermediate point the ring will have a zig-zag (alternating direction) appearance within a cylindrical envelope. Upon ultimate expansion the ring is circular and contained within a plane. The ring will then break and ultimately tend to form one or more straight rods. Since the net momentum of the rod relative to the missile is roughly zero, its effectiveness will rapidly diminish as the broken ring expands. This rapidly expanding ring, when hitting the aircraft, can be more effective than an equivalent fragmentation warhead: the ring of rods provides a larger surface area than a fragmented ballistic. Portions of the aircraft intercepted by the expanding ring of the continuous rod warhead will receive a continuous cut through the skin, flight or aerodynamic surfaces, underlying cables, hydraulic lines, and other flight or mission-critical structures. This may cause a structural failure, or, if not, can be sufficient for defeating the redundancy of aircraft systems. The effect is only pronounced as long as the ring is unbroken, so multiple layers of rods are employed in practical weapons to increase the effective radius. When designing the ill-fated SAM-equipped Mauler, Monte Carlo simulations on the then-state-of-the-art IBM 650 indicated that a continuous-rod warhead was likely to be less effective than blast fragmentation types. Subsequent implementations indicated the opposite. References Rocketry Anti-aircraft weapons Ammunition es:Ojiva de barra contínua