Stupid users around explosives abound in the military. A Senior Chief climbed up in the loading tray for 5 inch MK 45 autoloader, because the spent propellant casing had not made the switch to cycle the next round and propellant casing. The Senior Chief made the switch while standing in the loading tray, the gun mount loading system loaded the Senior Chief into the 5 in barrel or most of him.

WMS

FA fuzes require a several thousand G setback, followed by spinning at several thousand RPM some relatively large number of times. And they have to be spinning that fast due to springs.

Page 21-24 here show some views of one safety mechanism. http://proceedings.ndia.org/5560/Thursday/..._V-A/Wagner.pdf

I have no idea about the internals of a 40mm fuze.

Lobbing a grenade through a window has the potential for excessive collateral damage, since one doesn't know who else is in the room. As a first resort, it can be excessive, depending on the rate of fire and the number and accuracy of the shooters. There is nothing quite so annoying as the public backlash that accompanies blowing up a room full of orphans to kill one guy, after all.

I read in a Vietnam memoir how the military administration decided at some point in time and in some area to put extra safety locks on hand grenades after one guy ended up killing a whole bunch of his buddies because of a hand grenade accident while jumping off a truck. I believe it might have been "Green Knight, Red Mourning", which is an awesome and kick ass Vietnam memoir everyone should read anyway.

Anyway, the point of the story was that later on, when the author and his buddies were attacked at night by the North Vietnamese, people were having trouble arming the grenades because of the extra safety locks, so the grenades were about as useful as rocks. I think that one person ended up throwing a safe grenade at a North Vietnamese guy just to make him run away and seek cover, as a psychological ploy as there was nothing better he could do with the safe grenade at that time. During that ambush, the author also tackled and enemy and killed him in hand to hand combat by ripping his balls off, which is badass. I think I actually quoted that section of the book on this forum earlier in another thread...

It has similar requirements, but lower setback, and less spinning, because of the MUCH lower velocity. (roughly 8 times less)

The fuze of a 40mm HE grenade takes up nearly half the volume of the projectile.

Really, it does a lot of complex stuff, reliably, in terrible conditions for something that small.

I take it he didn't make it?

No he was a closed casket funeral, let say.

All it takes is one moment of not paying attention, then bad things happen.

Fair Winds and Following Seas Senior Chief.

WMS

classical problem here in norway to. ever so often a mine wash ashore or some leftover artilleryshells are dug up. fun stuff...

and is there not a french farm thats sitting slap bang on top of the single biggest explosives stockpile from WW1? so much so that if it goes of it will remove the whole farm from the map iirc...

UXO is a problem all over the world but it certainly seems pronounced in an area as small as Okinawa. The thing that gets me is that these EOD guys aren't digging mines out of the ground, they're digging out artillery shells, mortars, and grenades. It's pretty crazy.

Did anyone see that report on CNN about the guy who blew himself up while restoring a Civil War cannonball?

When, of course, the public backlash should be against the "one guy" who chose to stand in a room full of orphans before he started shooting.

"Should" matters a lot less than "would".

he would be a dead "local". the soldier(s) would be living forigners that killed innocent children...

or at least, thats how the local spindoctors (also known as charismatic leaders) would present it...

Dude. Get people to respond rationally to the Trolly Problem and its related subproblems, and then that might be considered a relevant point.

~J

It is still a relevant point. I just ain't gonna happen, which I'm sure Critias was quite aware of before he made that post.

Actually, it isn't even clearly decided. For example, who should the public backlash be against for the deaths in the Moscow theatre siege?

For that matter, should the public backlash be restricted to one side?

~J

You'll note that Critias did not actually stipulate that anything should be one-sided. Merely that the public should not hold the gunman in a roomful of orphans blameless.

If someone knowingly and willfully hides himself amongst a pack of orphans, then starts taking potshots at someone against whom he knows has -- I don't know, just off the top of my head -- grenade launchers and assault rifles...you cannot solely blame the targets if some of those orphans get shot in the ensuing firefight. The gunman in such an example chose to hide himself amongst soft targets -- essentially, to use them as cover -- and because it was a battleground and, even, a fight of his choosing, he is at least as to blame as those who return fire in order to defend themselves. Particularly in a case such as this, where the soldiers returning fire didn't even know the orphans were there (if all you see is a gunman in a window, it's a more fair assumption that sharing the room with him might be MORE gunmen, rather than thinking to yourself "I bet that room is full of fluffy white kittens" or orphans or whatever).

Sure, sure, in the greater scheme of things the entire affair is all George Bush's fault, or whoever you want to pin things on for the situation being made possible in the first place. Go back far enough, and this sort of thing is almost always a politician's fault, ultimately, rather than the fault of the poor schmucks with boots on the ground.

But on the micro level, going "OH NOES, teh evil soldiers killed'ed innocent civilians for no reason!" is the worst sort of armchair generalship. Yes, it would be unfortunate if these hypothetical orphans died in a hail of gunfire and/or grenades. However, it would not have happened had someone not started a gunfight right there, surrounded by orphans. Blame the guy who surrounded himself with civilians before he chose to start shooting.

One problem with that is the expectation of police or any other percieved "good guys" to be bound by things like ethics (which is usually not attributed to terrorists, shadowrunners or other opposition).

So while the one lunatic hiding next to orphans will be condemned for what he does, the hiding next to orphans part does not really matter anymore for the media. Police/Lone Star killing these orphans (be it calculated or by mistake - it really doesn't matter) however is something the media loves to make profit with, because in addition to dead orphans (pretty good to sell by itself), the police supposedly broke their moral responsibility (and that is just so much bigger news than orphans killed by a lunatic)

Knight Errant would love this kind of marketing and I am pretty sure they jump on every possibility.

ok, that just gave me one hell of a run idea. if i ever get to deploy it, poor runners...

I think Lone Star and KE even hire runners to stage such incidents. Aztlan does it differently - if a civilian gets killed by police shooting at a criminal, the criminal gets charged with murder for that.

my thoughts exactly, but with a nice little twist

You mean they would, for a change, not try to set the hired runners up as fall guys to be taken out by the "good and better suited for the Law Enforcement contract" guys?

During my days at TAMU, I was a Cadet, my company was a Cutting Company for the then annual Bonfire.

There area we cut trees in, was an old exercise training area. There was/is alot of exploded ordinance there. One weekend, we cut brush down, and "found" a 75mm Howitzer and a 90mm cannon both with out wheels but fairly intact no major amounts of rust/decay.

Those that actually discovered this were abit scared, ie they chopped down some heavy brush and see a barrel of a large gun pointed at them.

We were warned to major extents not to mess with any things "unusual", "metallic" or "Strange" while cutting trees there, I was not uncommon to "discover" stacks of unused ordinance or unexploded ordinance while working there.

WMS

that is like SO Shadowrun *g*

damn it, im that predictable?!

hmm, that reminded me of a recent news item i watched about people locating fallen german soldiers on the east front around the polish/german border. reason for it not being done before now was that iron curtain. among other things that was still left in that forest area they showed was mortar shells neatly stacked in a v branched tree. the things where brown with rust and probably unstable as hell.

Well, yeah. Still, the question of whether it was "right" isn't necessarily trivial—see, I don't know, probably about half of the variations on the tram problem.

See, I guess it's about here that my true problem, with regard to gut feeling (rather than playing devil's advocate), comes in. I'm really not sure I can insist that every person involved in armed resistance against an overwhelmingly superior force do so in the most ineffectual way possible—can you honestly suggest a better option than surrounding yourself with orphans or the like? It just seems to me like the right thing to do, given the circumstances.

(I think I got banned from another forum for saying something like this once)

~J

It might be tactically sound, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a conscious decision they're making to purposefully put innocents -- in almost all such cases, the same innocents they claim to be fighting for in the first place -- into harm's way very, very, directly (and for their own, personal, safety and gain).

What's tactically sound in an asymmetric warfare operation isn't always what's morally right. It might make sense for me to grab a human shield and hold it in front of me if I'm a bank robber confronted by a cop with a gun...that doesn't mean it's okay, though, or ethically good.

But it also doesn't mean it isn't, is the thing.

Bah. Nonresistance is simpler, if only I had the intestinal fortitude to actually follow it…

~J

Sorry, but purposefully drawing fire towards noncombatants is wrong. It might be the sort of wrong you can swallow up and live with, convince yourself it's a part of the greater good -- but it's still wrong.

Because I might act the same way in someones position means I identify with them, but it doesn't make their actions morally defensible.

People who hide amongst noncombatants have a very warped definition of "victory". A defender of a nation is supposed to protect it's citizens at any cost. Not use them as a meat shields and pawns in some sort of intangible "war of public opinion".

Generally speaking, this is why it is best to have a policy of always killing hostages and meat shields even when it would be trivial to save them. Once your enemies come to the conclusion that you're evil sum-beaches who don't care if civilians die (and would possibly enjoy the deaths of civilians) they would stop bothering to use meat-shields because there would be no point in doing so.

This works better in law enforcement where criminals use hostages to buy time for escape than in asymmetrical warfare where hostage-takers do so to sway public opinion.

You are never allowed to be a police officer. Like, ever.

Using humans as bullet shields is an unfortunately time-honored tradition of weak military (or perhaps, "military" would be better) forces at this point. It's not like you're going to convince terrorist groups that they should stop however; they'll say that if they were to stop using civilian shields they'd be wiped out, and they're probably not wrong. I can understand the position, but I still think it's morally wrong.

Too bad the times of interstate warfare are over (and let's hope they won't come back). The world is quickly moving towards warfare based on information and clever use of media. Defending the citizens is not done on the national level anymore, but in rhetorics and propaganda videos.
A sad fact is all rival parties claim to be right and blame the others if casualties ensue - the audience is either brainwashed or doesn't give a damn anymore as they get bombarded with news 24/7. Iraq has been an interesting field the last years.

I feel tempted to quote Anna Navarre at this point, but it would be funnier if I instead typed out the following sketch:

SCARY GUY: Mwah hwah hwah, I have grabbed a human shield, therefore thou mayest not shoot at me.

HEROIC GUY: 7.62 NATO, BITCH!

*kablam kablam kablam*

HUMAN SHIELD: Blarg, I am slain.

SCARY GUY: Me too.

The victory they are striving for in this case is the expulsion of foreign soldiers by any means necessary, and that doesn't seem terribly warped to me. The people at the top of these organizations may be misguided religeous nutcases, but their actions towards their objectives are very well reasoned and pragmatic. The best way to get that to happen is to turn the populace at large against the invaders and there is no better way to do this than to bait said foreigners into killing civilians. Killing collaborators is standard practice as well. Their actions are certainly morally gray and much darker than the soldiers who shoot into said crowd of civilians, but killing civies is killing civies even if your opponent makes you shoot around them. They would have be literally insane to meet their opponents in direct combat so they do it through other means. Dishonorable? Most certainly, but anything outside of a duel with conditions agreed upon by both parties is.

Leaders, whether in government, industry or otherwise, are almost always ends-justify-means types of people. The Real World and the Sixth World have far more in common than I would like.

Wounded Ronin:
The problem with doing things that way is that the entire populace would turn against you in a heartbeat and it is impossible to succeed in those circumstances without destroying the very thing you're fighting over. The US got it's butt handed to it in Vietnam in largely because the public didn't support them and colaborated with the north. *edit* Note that I mean the South Vietnamese public, not the US public. They had nearly nothing to do with the final outcome. */edit*

One more thought: A defender of a nation's job description is not to defend it's people, it is to defend the nation's political structure and economic interests. That may not be what they like to think of themselves, but that is how they are used. The vast majority of wars have been the national equivalent of a mugging.

yep, and if one want to be honest, most people are nothing more then industry fuel/parts...

*shrugs*
I guess I'm just idealistic. Oops.

A cure that is worse than a disease is a disease in it's own right.

Well, sure. I was just looking for something funnier than Anna Navarre.


Also, LOL at conservatives in the US to this day trying to pin everything that went wrong in Vietnam on a bunch of college protestors.

Its totally bizarre isn't it? I find it darkly funny that I even had to clarify. The most I'll give them is that local unrest might have made us finally concede defeat but the Vietnamese were the ones who defeated us.

Directing fire towards non combatants is a tried and true technique in armed resistance. The thing is that if the blue team gun down some civilians, even by accident, those civilians have bothers, fathers, sisters, sons, daughters, mothers etc who are now really pissed off that the blue team just shot billy to all hell.

They are now primed for red team recruiting efforts. This is why its a really bad idea to have private military contractors cowboys aligned with the blue team riding around and spraying down the area with ammo. It's really easy to fix though - be a bit more precise instead of hosing the area down.

No-one who doesn't already hate isreali minds when some mad hamas bomber or whatever gets blown up by hellfire missile - but when you kill some civilians in the area - well.. they have a family. A family who is now pissed the hell off.

Anyway, saying they are hiding amongst the population is total bollocks. They ARE the population. The guy sniping at you know isn't some super hero jetting in to save the day. Its billy's dad. And he really hates you.

Yeah, the Germans really hated the US and UK for flattening their cities, and hence the armed resistance continued all the way into June of 1945..... As to effective counterinsurgency tactics, I need to find a web version of Eisenhower's Werwolf order.

here try this
Werewolf Order

WMS

I'm looking for the counterinsurgency order issued by SHAEF. The one that called for mass executions, etc...

here is a link to what you describe
Wiki Werewolf


[4]Biddiscombe, Perry (1998). Werwolf!: The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement, 1944-1946. University of Toronto Press, 464. ISBN 978-0802008626.

Excerpts from the above book
Werewolf!


WMS

You have no idea how much that made me want to re-install Return To Castle Wolfenstein.

<edited away by self due to lacking relvance to topic>

Consider the possibilities inherent in the phrase "a fate worse than death". All you have to do is think of something as being that, and suddenly the possibility of killing people you're trying to protect from whatever it is just doesn't seem like such a bad deal.

It's the same deal with certain strongly-held religious beliefs. As soon as you truly believe that someone is at risk of being condemned to eternal suffering without possibility of reprieve, anything becomes permissible in order to save them, including inflicting extreme anguish or death on them (because it isn't eternal).

To throw another spanner into the mix (off of the above point), consider that there may be counterinsurgency tactics which are not acceptable because peace is not worth who or what we have to become to enact them.

~J

Pfft, don't let that stop ya. None of the rest of us do.