Your arm-chair general-fu is weak. It might keep them from sticking their gun out the window, but it doesn't keep them from tossing a grenade out of the window and down to you.

Yeah, I thought about that. Then I realized that neither does a wall, or pretty much anything else they're likely to be hiding behind.

~J

Well the problem with the sniper wasn't that he was trying to kill me, it's that he was in the process of killing everyone else. I had the element of surprise so it made sense to put a grenade in through the window, I just identified the least efficient/safe method of accomplishing this (caused by a steady diet of American action films I suppose).

I don't know, I really didn't think of suppressing fire because I was looking at a 3 inch gap between the bottom of the windowsill and the top. I didn't particularly want to step into the street for a better shot because several people had already been shot there. That might have been selfish of me.

I'm fine with the rule. Grenades are highly random and unreliable devices. There are numerous stories of soldiers survivnig nearby grenade blasts with virtually no injury. Grenades can be duds or the user can fail to arm them properly. Any nearby object might deflect enough of the blast, etc.

Never mind...

I have another issue with grenades: it's the insane damage that can potentially be inflicted due to the rules about blast reflection.

If a frag grenade explodes at your feet when you're walking in the middle of a 2m large corridor, you basically have to soak 72 damage boxes, as long as the walls are sturdy enough to reflect all blast reflections of course.
Even a minimaxed troll tank is killed on the spot.

Depends on the grenade. Frags thrown into a room chock full of wooden dummies that fall over when bumped the wrong way dont budge the things, but when its over theyve all got BB sized holes in em in many locations.

My understanding of mk2 pineapples was that since the fuse actually burned they'd emit smoke when you armed them, and they'd also fail to explode if they landed in water.

Bungie then thought it would be a good idea to make underbarrel launch grenades fail to explode if they were fired into shallow water. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/sleepy.gif)

Re: the M203...

I knew a guy in the SCA who was a 2nd Lt. in Iraq for about 4 years before he got himself shipped back to the US. He regaled us with strange and bizzare stories of the desert, often with pictures - such as digging mini coffins in the dirt to sleep in during a sandstorm, only to have it rain on him at night, so everyone woke up encased in rapidly drying mud.

One particular story involved being in Fallujah with his unit. They were camped out in some random building, playing sentry and waiting for further go orders, when some schmoe across the street started taking pot shots at them with a rifle. According to him, one of his squadmates had been napping and was woken up. Calm as a cucumber, he rolled over, shimmied his way over to the window, and peeked out. Apparently he saw the guy with the rifle, because he just sat up and popped a grenade directly into the shooter's window. The shooting stopped.

Apparently the CO took this guy aside and told him, "Great initative, soldier. A bit excessive, but great initative."

What kind of moron decides to take pot shots at a group of soldiers?

Well, a dead one now, it seems. I wasn't there. I just heard the story, man.

Someone who KNOWS that god is on his side. It seems he was wrong....

Says you! Maybe this guy rocked so hard that god was like, "Dude, he's coming to paradise RIGHT NOW!"
God keeps it real for his homies, after all.

being woken up from peacefull resting slumber by someone wanting to kill you?
there is no excessive to the retaliation in that particular situation . .
as for grenades, one of my buddies told me this story wherein the middle of the night one soldier could not sleep and was playing with one of his grenades . . until he suddenly feels the safety ring go pop . . being in the middle of his fellow soldiers, having no idea where to throw the damn thing he counted to 6 on a 7 second fuse appearantly and threw the thing straight up to have it explode above them . . yeah, he was kicked out for that one . .

I had an EOD (Explosive Ordinance Disposal) tech tell me about some hot shit Gunnery Sergeant who picked up an expended but unexploded 203 and took it back to his office to use as a paperweight. At some point he tossed it into one of his drawers where it proceeded to roll back and forth... eventually completing the number of revolutions necessary to arm and explode. He assured me that the results required a mop and several large trash bags.

Who knows if it's true but I've seen people, even/especially high ranking people, make some very poor life decisions.

Like that corporal in my company, at the end of basic training. He got a recruit who was a student of chemistry to make him some home-made explosive, and tested a tiny bit of it in our non-com quarters with some machine-gun ammo belt links. Results? Scorched table, and a window with a belt-link-sized hole in it. He also used to (illegally) carry a loaded Walther PPK with a round chambered on leave. (Nothing like seeing a bullet drop from the chamber after doing the old "remove magazine, pull receiver back to check if a gun is loaded when first picking it up" to drive home the fact that every gun is to be treated as loaded, no matter how stupid it would be for someone to hand it to you loaded, chambered and with the safety off...)

who the fuck designs explosives that explode more or less on random?
that concept right there is even worse than conventional mines for fucks sake!

Stahlseele, you miss the point: the grenade is not designed to explode at random, the "only arms after it has gone through X revolutions" is a safety mechanism, it means the grenade, which is spinning when fired, has to travel a certain distance before it'll be armed and ready to explode, so if you fire it too close, it won't explode.

At least 120 mm mortar grenades have the same feature, which saved quite a lot of lives in my company once, when a grenade misfired, and only flew 50 meters instead of 4 km (and landed right behind the soldier triangulating the other tanks).

So, the grenade worked as designed, and did not explode, but then the Srgt. went and put it in a drawer, where it started to roll around when the drawer was opened and closed, and finally armed itself.

i still think that's a dumb system for timing explosions <.< . . what happened to the good old impact boom? ._.

Oh! No, it still goes boom on impact there's just a minimum distance before it decides it's okay to go boom. I can't remember how far that distance is but it's basically just far enough so that an unintended discharge (or some sort of defect in the arming mechanism) doesn't make it explode the first time you take a hard bump.

So goes the story. EOD tech's are an odd bunch who wear witty shirts like "If you see me running try to keep up". He could have been pulling my leg but it certainly seemed reasonable. This story was related to me when I first reached Okinawa because Okinawa still has tons of unexploded ordinance going all the way back to World War II. People stumble across them all the time and the dumb ones take them home because they think it looks cool.

The story was told to demonstrate two things:
1. When you're done with training it's very important that you carefully clear the training area of things that should have gone boom but didn't. When in doubt go find someone who does this for a living. Gunnery Sgt Not Very Smart would still be alive if someone hadn't have missed an unexploded grenade
2. You are not as smart as you think you are. Don't think you're totally awesome because you have a "dud" grenade as a paperweight.

But no, I don't think the 203 would be such a popular weapon if it exploded randomly (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) It takes real hard work and dedicated stupidity to frag yourself.

Again, the "impact boom" is there, it just remains inactive unless the revolution counter has gone down - to avoid the "oops, I stumble..BOOM" problem. The grenade is not armed until it has gone through X revolutions, after which it will have travelled y meters. Past y meters, it's "Impact? Boom

Think of it as magical safety bullets that don't break skin unless they've gone a minimum distance from the muzzle. Can't you see how that would cut down on mishaps and accidents and injuries from negligence and accidents?

Now, remember we're talking about explosives here. Can't you see that it's an even better idea, for a fired grenade to not go off a very, very, short distance from the muzzle of the weapon that fired it?

Aye. A negligent discharge from a underslung GL pointed "safely" at the ground would be the modern definition of "hoist by your own petard"... along with any nearby squadmates or civilians.

About the m203 rounds,

Another safety feature is that the rotations don't start arming the fuze without some pretty serious g-forces. (like being fired from a M203)

So, if you can slam a M203 round on just the right surface with just the right force, while giving it a half turn at the same time, you can roll it in your hands several times and have a live grenade. You still have to smack it on something point first.

What makes dud rounds so spectacularly dangerous is that you don't know what went wrong for it to not function. Is the fuze just a bit too stiff? Did the fuse trigger, but jam half-way? You just don't know.

Which makes "cleaning up the target slope" of an artillery range a very, very risky venture. Not something you should send a company of recruits on after a 5 minutes "lesson" of "this is a safe piece to pick up, this is a dud".