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etalian posted:potato masher had longer range but on the flip side was less lethal than pineapple grenade since it didn't have a fragmentation effect. The Model 24 and the effect but the later Model 43 stick grenade had fragmentation sleeves for defensive use. Seems kinda troublesome, but the Germans still like the idea of having modular grenades that can swap between defensive fragmentation grenades and purely-overpressure offensive grenades since the DM51 from the 1970s had a slip-on fragmentation sleeve.
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Sep 20, 2015 20:16
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Vladimir Putin posted:Well here's another thought. If potato masher grenades were so great how come no modern army uses them? We drat sure stole everything else we thought was awesome: jet designs, rockets, Stg44, the m60 heavily borrows from the mg42, I think there's a European army LMG that looks exactly like a mg42. But nobody took the potato masher grenade? The Germans and the Serbians never gave up the MG42, they just remade them in modern calibers. The Spanish even made a baby brother MG42 called the Ameli. VendaGoat posted:Frags are designed to be used from behind some form of cover. As Etalian said, because there is a risk of injury to the user. It's pretty understated how quickly those blast waves dissipate. A grenade's overpressure wave falls off pretty dramatically, mostly because, while it's a high explosive, it's not a few a whole lot, just a few ounces. Within a half a meter, you can expect to be blown in half by the explosion, at a bit over a meter, the blast wave will seriously injury someone that they might need to stay in a hospital for a couple months, and at two meters, they only have the potential of getting their eardrums burst. That's why fragmentation is such a big deal. Even the U.S. Army knew this and made low explosive versions of their grenades with blank powder fillers, presumably as offensive-role grenades, which was enough to provide fragmentation but not enough to have it go past a certain radius. Also, the weird thing about flash bangs or explosives in general is how their blast waves move. The peak pressure of a flash bang to a lethal grenade are pretty similar, however, the flash bang's shock front tends to hit slower, like a few microseconds less, and that's apparently enough to distribute the pressure across your body a way it's only disorienting and not fatal. It's not being splashed on you but poured onto you. etalian posted:Probably because they have downsides such as lower carrying capacity. This. A shipping crate of potato mashers held about 15 of them. A comparable box of American Mk 2 "pineapple" grenades, which weighed as much as a potato masher, could carry 25 of them. Also, I believe the stick in regards to throwing was overrated. It had a farther range in some cases, but not all cases. Like, you could get some range on it standing up and leaning into the throw, but, in a combat situation, when are you going to really have a opportunity like that when there's a bunch of automatic weapons fire incoming at your general position.
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Sep 20, 2015 22:25
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Vladimir Putin posted:Based on how it looks I'm going to guess that it doesn't function that well. quote:The mechanism worked as in the following, in the top of the O.T.O was a lead ball that was designed to push the striker into the primer, but it was hindered by a safety bar. While the grenade was being thrown, it is supposed that this safety bar would be removed while in the air because it is connected to the safety lever which is supposed to fall out with the force of the throw, allowing the striker to hit the primer when the lead ball hit the striker itself.[2] This would occur during impact. That's a lot of "supposeds". Also, the grenade had no timing fuze, but it would detonate on impact. So, if you screw up a throw and hit an obstacle in front of you or pulled the pin and dropped it, arrivederci.
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Sep 20, 2015 22:44
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Griz posted:modern armies don't need hand grenades that you can throw farther when they have various types of grenade launchers and rocket launchers There's a few. Japan supposedly never adopted grenade launchers so they continue to use rifle grenades. France as well never adopted them, as well, with the FA-MAS famously having a grenade launcher sight built in. And even though they have dedicated grenade launchers, Israel uses them for urban terrain fighting since grenade launchers have a high trajectory and rocket launchers have limitations like range and backblast. The SIMON breaching rifle grenade, which actually got adopted in limited numbers in the United States, is particularly useful, since it can blow holes in walls and blow open doors. There's been talk about bringing back rifle grenades, since most everything around is still built for them: pretty much all NATO-issued assault rifles are built around the 21mm diameter and have sufficient lengths of exposed barrel to slip a rifle grenade on and attack targets in urban terrain, give riflemen close-in anti-armor support without having to be issued a bulky, disposable rocket launcher, and give them an explosive area effect option that they don't have to be skilled in grenade launchers to use. There was a similar idea called the Rifleman's Assault Weapon, which was a rifle-mounted rocket. It fired in a straight trajectory up to 300m, similar to the M16 rifle so you didn't have to use ladder sights to aim it or be a specialist grenadier to use it. It was primarily an anti-armor weapon, using a photoelectric sensor to determine the appropriate distance to target to detonate from the target. It could be used to blow man-sized holes in a structure's wall for soldiers to enter through. It would basically be as if you gave everyone an RPG shell that could be fired from a rifle and not a dedicated launcher.
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Sep 21, 2015 01:32
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Pennywise the Frown posted:I understand that but rifle grenades compared to the M203 are almost identical in terms of purpose. They just function differently since technology has gotten better. Somewhat. I know that the APAV40 rifle grenade used by the French have more than double the explosive filler of the 40mm high-explosive grenades used in the M203. Young Freud fucked around with this message at 07:12 on Sep 21, 2015 |
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Sep 21, 2015 06:13
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If you want to get into the real nitty-gritty of explosives modelling, here's some science. There's an equation called the Sadovsky equation, which allows you to determine the peak overpressure caused by various forms of explosives at a certain distance. This is why fragmentation is more important than blast effects, since the area for lethal blast effects tend to be very minor. The equation for an open air explosion at standard 1 atmosphere air pressure looks like this. The constants can change if at earth surface but open air is good enough for now.  delta-P1 is the change in pressure in atm, this will be important later when we start comparing terminal effects. k is the relative effectiveness factor or TNT equivalent of the explosive. TNT is the baseline constant here at 1, but more modern explosives tend to be a mixture. For example, Composition B, which is used in a lot of explosives such as the M67 grenade in used by American armed forces, is 60% hexogen and 40% TNT, the combination being a third more powerful than TNT. m is the mass of the explosive in kilograms. Since I'm using the M67 as an example, the Comp B filler is about 0.155kg. r is the radius in meters. Since I can't divide by zero, I'll go ahead and figure the base figure for contact at 0.33m which is about a foot distance. For the M67 grenade, the explosion will generate a peak overpressure change of about +50atm. At about 0.66m (or around 2 feet), the change drops to about +7.93atm. At 1m, the overpressure change is at +2.88atm. At 2m, the overpressure change is +0.66atm, and at 3m, the overpressure change is +0.32atm. Now, what does this all mean? Well, here's a handy chart for what these overpressure changes can do to the human body... quote:You can also use the following general observations on action of blastwave on overage human (1 kg/cm2 ~ 1 atm): So, at from contact to about 2/3 of a meter, it will blow off something completely, yet at 1 meter, you could be pretty banged up and survive. At 2 meters, you probably have burst eardrums and have permanent loss of hearing and at 3 meters, the only thing wrong with you is that your ears are probably ringing for a bit. But that drop off in overpressure in that first meter is why you get stuff like this... ...where the grenade went off in his hand and he survived. It's also why you've heard of guys throwing themselves on grenades with their buddies nearby and getting killed or blown in half while the rest of the squad is okay. What's even more interesting is that there's a separate chart for determining building damage... quote:
Yeah, you read that right. You can easily survive an explosion that would knock down a reinforced concrete wall. Now, I've been saying that fragmentation is why grenades get their lethality from. That's a whole other few sets of equations called the Gurney equations, which allows someone to model how fast the fragments are going when the liner is broken up by the explosion. Typically, these speeds are measured in kilometers per second. However, I'm not as well-versed with this as I am with the Sadovsky formulas and can not get an accurate reading, so I'll just end this here.
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Sep 21, 2015 07:12
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Frostwerks posted:ive heard of navies using concussion grenades as point defense against underwater threats, ie frogmans, and poo poo. does the denser medium make that equation differ in any way? Likely, although there may actually be another equation used all together. Sadly, I can't continue on this since I need sleep and have work tomorrow.
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Sep 21, 2015 07:41
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