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Engineering
General Engineering
Applying pressure for clearing land mines
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[QUOTE="Baluncore, post: 6071047, member: 447632"] This thread was specificaly looking for ways to detonate individually located mines. It does not need to locate those mines, or sweep entire areas. The problem with sowing mine fields is mine separation. If the mines are too close, sympathetic detonation will trigger more mines with the shrapnel from the first to be triggered. That could run away to trigger the majority of the field. For that reason a mine field must be sown sparse, and the mines need to be small. Unfortunately, a bomber full of rocks is expensive, that makes it very expensive to guarantee clearance because you need to cover 100% of the ground with falling rock. It could become very expensive in bombers and pilots as about 10 truck loads, or about 100 tonnes of gravel would be needed. So why quarry all that rock, crush it to gravel and transport it when that is not actually needed? An old technique that has been used to blow pathways through minefields is to drop a line of HE shells or bombs that will penetrate the ground before detonating. Those shells throw local rock in the air, along with a few mines, and so leave a line of craters and blown mines that mark a safe route. The weight of a barrow load of HE is small compared to many truck loads of gravel, and it costs much less to deliver. “Operations research” was developed during WW2 to increase the effectiveness of available resources. [URL]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operations_research#Second_World_War[/URL] The most obvious solution with the biggest bang is rarely an optimum solution. Dropping heavy depth charges on submarines was always spectacular, but throwing out a circle of 24 mortar shells that sank and only detonated on contact was not exciting at all, but it was more than 10 times as effective in destroying submarines. See the statistics at; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedgehog_(weapon) There is no question that if you can accurately locate all the landmines in a field, you can destroy them individually very efficiently. Just what you use to trigger the mines is the subject of this thread. It should be cheap, expendable and frangible, such as a bag of sand or a plastic bottle of water. [/QUOTE]
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Applying pressure for clearing land mines
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