Historical, Alternate History, Modern Era or Future Tech, Weapons, Vehicles, Equipment and Tactics

If you want more range then the stick grenade is a pretty good choice. Need to do something about the arming method, though.

What's wrong with the arming method of existing stick grenades?

Stick grenades were activated by pulling a cord hidden inside the hollow handle. However, they did not have a safety lever that you could hold down to prevent the fuse from igniting until it was thrown. With a pineapple grenade, you could arm the grenade and hold onto it for a short while, then throw it when an opportunity presented itself. But with a stick grenade, you had to pull the cord and throw it immediately, which required both hands. A slight inconvenience, but a safety lever does offer a bit more tactical flexibility.

It's worth noting that the stick grenade was meant for offensive use, relying on blast and concussion to inflict damage in a small area, while the pineapple grenade was a defensive type, relying on fragmentation to inflict damage over a wider area. The stick grenade was more effective when used against enemies lurking in a foxhole, a trench, or a bunker, while a frag works better on enemies out in the open.

edited 16th Jul '17 9:34:14 AM by pwiegle

You also had 2 or 3 full revolutions to unscrew the safety from a stick grenade while a mills grenade had a simple pull pin.

edited 16th Jul '17 10:14:45 AM by Belisaurius

Rob: Even then the fragmentation pattern would still be inferior to the spheroid design as parts of the disk would block the pattern even arranged like that. The only way you could get a better fragmentation pattern then what is commonly used would either be to have it reliably air burst or able to aim directed fragmentation. The spheroid shapes also have other advantages such as being able to be easily rolled, more easily thrown from a larger array of positions, and the shape is far more intuitive to users.

There was actually a project to include a mechanism on hand grenades that would flip the grenade up into the air and burst. It never panned out There are also bounding launched grenades.

As for the stick grenades like pwiegle said they were pretty much blast weapons, sure there was some fragmentation but not by deliberate design. The German Heer addressed this in 1942 with the addition of a simple clip on scored fragmentation sleeve called a Splitterring. It obviously provided much needed fragmentation effects but its use was sporadic in general.

The stick grenade had two general advantages. Namely the stick helped the user throw the grenade further despite the cost of weight and the cumbersome fuse system. Their warheads were also surprisingly modular and could be readily rigged up as impromptu mines, demo charges, or other similar devices. The handle screwed off the warhead making adding different warheads possible and was done in a few instances especially the utilization of Nipolit grenade heads. There was also a smoke grenade version and one that used a fuse on the warhead portion instead of in the handle. It was still a pull string fuse but it was easier to use.

As for the safety lever the Germans had an example in the first world war but the design wasn't very good and it was abandoned however the Soviets hand thrown AT grenades were stick types with a head warhead that were oriented by drogue chutes and included safety levers. Basically it is possible to include a safety lever for stick grenades but it wasn't done for the most commonly encountered varieties.

There are two things to remember about launched grenades vs thrown. Launched grenades have a minimum range requirement in most cases as a built in safety measure usually around 30m.

If humanity was determined to create caseless ammunition and never stopped development, what is the earliest that caseless ammunition could be developed?

Probably around post WW 2 era tech. You'd need some kind of plastizier in order to get the powder to stick together and those didn't show up until the rocket era.

You'll also have some issue with heat since the bullet casing doubles as a heat sink. There are also minor issues with chamber sealing since the casing helps seal off the chamber.

Combustible paper cartridges were the first example of a caseless style cartridge design. Unlike the earlier paper cartridges they were not torn open to prime the pan and pour the charge down the barrel.

The first example existed at the very start of the 1800's. This design led to the Dreyse Needle gun and the Chassepot gun. Both of which used combustible paper cartridges. Anything that isn't burned up is typically blown out the front of the weapon .

Civil War era revolvers typically used combustible cartridges as well. The paper was often treated with a material to help it combust such as some form of nitrate.

edited 17th Jul '17 5:30:22 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Forgot about flash paper. Disregard what I said.

Bel: For the most part you are still good. There is a good reason they went over to brass cased cartridges. Even greased Papier-mâché variants were fragile. Something that still hasn't been overcome and we have been poking at the cartridge tech for nearly two centuries.

Thanks for the feedback.

In WW 2 how many torpedo ships would you need to take down a Super Dreadnought or Dreadnought? If a force of torpedo boats found itself cornered and with no alternatives, what is the minimum amount of torpedo boats you would need to take down a torpedo boat destroyer?

In WWII single torpedo hits have doomed even carriers due to a hit at a bad location. HMS Ark Royal took on in the tail and that was end of Ark Royal. The USS Obrien a destroyer was done in by a single torpedo. Smaller ships are more likely to suffer serious damage from a single torpedo hit. Typically submarines, torpedo boats, and torpedo bomber flights send off several at once. Battle Cruiser Kongo only ate two and it had anti-torpedo bulges but was still screwed.

Basically it depends where the torpedo hits.

edited 19th Jul '17 1:54:12 AM by TuefelHundenIV

Ark Royal might well have been savable had they not left it so long to try (Working from the record of Courageous they assumed a quick sinking, which is ironic since, had Ark been just slightly slower to respond, she would have been hit a week before Courageous, proving her survivability.

Now if you want a ship that shows just what a single torpedo in the wrong place can do, look no further than the Prince of Wales, which was heavily damaged by a single torpedo. Or in other words it was a golden BB, ironic since BB is the US navy's hull classification for a Battleship, so for the Japanese it really was a golden BB.

edited 19th Jul '17 4:35:41 AM by MattII

There was this one particular shot where you detonated the torpedo directly under the keel. Done right, it was almost always a one shot kill. However, you couldn't use a contact detonator to pull it off. Most of the time you had to use a timed fuse and then figure when your torpedo would hit the target. The Mk 14 torpedo actually used a magnetic influence detonator but everybody knows how bad the Mk 14's track record is.

You could also almost one-shot them by hitting them where the screw-shaft enters the hull too, and probably do considerable damage by just hitting the screws themselves, and those are at least are an easy-to-track target.

edited 24th Jul '17 2:03:50 AM by MattII

The air-dropped Mark 24 "FIDO" acoustic homing torpedo, and its sub-launched equivalent, the Mark 27 "Cutie."

edited 19th Jul '17 4:03:54 PM by pwiegle

Since we're on the subject of torpedoes, Cold Waters is a pretty accurate simulation or so I hear.

Anyhow, two things really stuck to me after playing this game.

First off, surface ships are irreperably noisy. Can't be helped for the most part. A propeller that close to the surface doesn't have the pressure to keep cavitation at bay. As a result, their sonar is degraded by their own propellers and even passive sonar can pick them up.

The second thing is that Torpedoes Have NO IFF. Seriously, remember in The Hunt For Red October with the Return To Sender? Entirely plausible! The only reason it doesn't happen more regularly is because of the tow cables we use for modern torpedoes

I have an idea for post #187 and the use of a machine gun like mechanism to load dreadnought gun shells. Could be have the length of belt between each individual shell on the ammo belt be equal to the length between the gun and the shell storage location below the waterline?

In order to reduce the chances of a jam perhaps the gun could use an up scaled version of G11 rifle ammo?

It's not practical to have a belt that long. You might as well just keep the elevator system.

Would it be worth it perhaps to just increase the armor on the turret and trade the extra weight and risk of a hit to the ammo belt for an increased fire rate? If we have a belt mechanism could we get the fire rate up to about 1 shot a second or more?

No, because individual 16" round weigh about a metric ton each. A chain would snap and the gearing needed to lift them all would have such extreme mechanical advantage that it would take a good minute to put the next round in place.

And then there's the propellant bags.

Just give it up, already. It is flat-out impossible to turn a sixteen-inch battleship gun into a ginormous machine gun, and your insistence on clinging to the idea is annoying.

The best way to improve the rate of fire of the big naval guns is to use auto-loaders and reduce the number of ammo pieces needed to fire the round. In theory you could create a fixed ammo 16" shell and have it load from a ready magazine at a fairly steady rate. Your not going to be getting full-auto kinds of fire rates but you will fire more quickly than the traditional loading method which has several steps.

Here you want to see some examples of rapid fire artillery check out the Archer Artillery System and the German Panzerhaubitze 2000. Both are modern systems that have high rates of fire for large bore artillery at about 9-10 rounds per minute with the PZ 2000 capable of a rapid fire 3 round burst from the ready magazine at a rate of a round every 3 seconds.

The big honking naval guns took so long to fire because they had to haul the shells from the depths of the ships magazines, pass it through several handling stations, and then load separate powder charges and then prep the gun for firing. You eliminate or automate those steps you can pick up the rate of fire.

Watch this old training vid and take note of how many times people were involved in one step or another of just getting the initial shell up. It took a crew of 26 per 79 per gun turret to even squeeze out 2 rounds per minute.

edited 26th Jul '17 6:43:00 PM by TuefelHundenIV

This is going to sound like a random question but would Dragon Skin armor be likely to be penetrated by a solid slug armor penetrating shotgun shell? I currently have it as cutting through it pretty easily. There's also no metal in the armor right?

Later in the timeline a cheap and reliable way to mass produce Wurzite Boron Nitride is created. If the ceramic in the Dragon Skin is replaced with Wurzite Boron Nitride would this make the armor significantly better? Would it be able to survive a single shot from that shotgun shell now?

edited 2nd Aug '17 5:43:06 AM by zepv

The main issue with dragon skin was that the disks were glued in place rather than stitched. As a result they liked to move when struck. A heavy round like that from a shotgun would probably have enough intertia to push the disks around if they hit at the right angle.