Now I wonder if it would be possible to engrave the complete works of William Shakespeare on an Iowa-class battleship’s 16 inch shell. Big bullet but that’s a lot of text.
You could write that in the head of a pin with room to spare.
In fact, the letters formed, an “S” and a “U” for Stanford University, are so small they could be used to print the 32-volume Encyclopedia Britannica 2,000 times and the contents would fit on the head of a pin.
To be fair, writing at that scale (couple of atoms’ height if I remember correctly) would probably not stand up to the simple friction or wear & tear of the physical loading and firing mechanisms. Meaning if you engraved the complete works of Shakespeare on a casing, no-one could probably tell once you fired the shot.
Large bore naval rifles are not generally cased. Iowas for instance do not use cases, you write stuff directly on the shell like a bomb. They just use a shell and bags of powder.
Now I wonder if it would be possible to engrave the complete works of William Shakespeare on an Iowa-class battleship’s 16 inch shell. Big bullet but that’s a lot of text.
You could write that in the head of a pin with room to spare.
To be fair, writing at that scale (couple of atoms’ height if I remember correctly) would probably not stand up to the simple friction or wear & tear of the physical loading and firing mechanisms. Meaning if you engraved the complete works of Shakespeare on a casing, no-one could probably tell once you fired the shot.
Large bore naval rifles are not generally cased. Iowas for instance do not use cases, you write stuff directly on the shell like a bomb. They just use a shell and bags of powder.