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> I drove a euro-spec Mercedes cab over truck (complete with the glass that turns to dust if something like a rock, a pipe or pieces of an IED goes through it) when I was a civilian contractor overseas and they are pretty tiny compared to the full sleepers we have over here.

Oh, so a 1960s vehicle? I'm fairly sure lorries in Europe have had laminated windscreens since about the 1970s.



The lamination keeps the whole thing from coming apart but the actual glass just breaks up into a bajillion little pieces making wearing eye protection a necessity.

It doesn’t all turn into powder though, think it has to do with the velocity of the penetrating object. A piece of shrapnel moving fast enough to put a nice mark in a Kevlar helmet leaves a little hole while a rock thrown into it makes it a big floppy mess. The pipe was kind of in the middle but I think that’s because it bounced off one of the ballistic plates I had on the dashboard instead of going straight through.

Before they put metal mesh screens over the windshield we were going through a lot of them so I’m pretty familiar with how euro-glass reacts to traumatic impacts.


Car windows in the US don't do this? Even my old Golf 2's windshield broke like this when I totaled it.


An IED? As in an Improvised Explosive Device? I suspect you're not comparing like with like here




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