Editing Shrapnel shell (section)

==Vietnam War era==
Although not strictly shrapnel, a 1960s weapons project produced splintex{{clarify|date=July 2022}} shells for 90 and 106&nbsp;mm recoilless rifles and 105&nbsp;mm [[howitzer]]s, where it was called a "[[Beehive anti-personnel round|beehive]]" round. Unlike the shrapnel shells’ balls, the splintex shells contained [[flechette]]s. The result was the 105&nbsp;mm M546 APERS-T (anti-personnel-tracer) round, first used in the [[Vietnam War]] in 1966. The shell consisted of approximately 8,000 one-half-gram flechettes arranged in five tiers, a time fuse, body-shearing detonators, a central flash tube, a smokeless propellant charge with a dye marker contained in the base and a tracer element. The shell functioned as follows: the time fuse fired, the flash traveled down the flash tube, the shearing detonators fired, and the forward body split into four pieces. The body and first four tiers were dispersed by the projectile's spin, the last tier and visual marker by the powder charge itself. The flechettes spread, mainly due to spin, from the point of burst in an ever-widening cone along the projectile's previous trajectory prior to bursting. The round was complex to make, but is a highly effective anti-personnel weapon – soldiers reported that after beehive rounds were fired during an overrun attack, many enemy dead had their hands nailed to the wooden stocks of their rifles, and these dead could be dragged to mass graves by the rifle. It is said that the name beehive was given to the munition type due to the noise of the flechettes moving through the air resembling that of a swarm of bees.