The Engineering Design Handbook of the Army Materiel Command is a coordinated series of handbooks containing basic information and fundamental data useful in the design and developmentof Army materiel and systems. The Handbooks are authoritativereference books of practical information and quantitative facts helpful in the design and development of materiel that will meet theneeds of the Armed Forces.The present handbook is one of a series on ballistics. It dealswith the dynamics of liquid-filled projectiles which are known tobehave in an unpredictable manner in flight. Until rather recentlythe causes of such misbehavior were not well understood. Wheneversuch problems arose in practice they were usually treated on anad hoc basis, i.e., by engineering trial and error methods. Suchmethods, as a rule, are time-consuming and expensive. Recently,however, considerable progress has been made in this field. Forcertain limited geometries of cavity shapes, such as the cylinderor near cylinder, it is now possible to give the designer a set ofsimple rules for the rational design of liquid-filled projectiles thatwill be dynamically stable in flight.This handbook summarizes the state of our present knowledgewhich is directly useful to the designer. Many of the more abstrusetheoretical developments, principally in Russian literature, areomitted. However, references to these are to be found in the Appendix C. Since the dynamics of the liquid-filled projectile is lessfamiliar to the designers than the dynamics of the rigid projectile,this handbook gives more of the theoretical background of solvedproblems than is usually found in other volumes of the EngineeringHandbook Series. The emphasis, however, is on the understandingthe physics of the problem rather than mathematics. Thus Chapter 2 contains a brief review of the dynamics of a rigid projectile;Chapters 3 to 8, inclusive, deal with the dynamics of the liquid andits reaction on the containing cavity. Chapter 9 is the design chapter where the rules for the design of the liquid-filled projectile areexplicitly stated. It would be unfortunate, however, if the designerswere to use this chapter without the understanding of the theoretical background as given in the preceding chapters.