(psst.. it's ordnance.) sorry, my english geek acting up again.

sounds interesting. if i didn't have a trainee i'd be reading it now. how's that for work ethic! :D

That makes two people who caught "ordnance" right away. Those beatings the nuns gave me worked wonders on my abilities to catch misspellings - and working on a former missile range helped too.

I think if it wasn't under war-time conditions, you were getting paid, and you were allowed to have fun, de-mining would be cool. I could think of a bunch of things to toss on the mines to make them blow. Perhaps see if some of those ways MacGyver defeated mines worked.

Fixed ordnance.

And Thermite. Would def use thermite.

Land mines are so yesterday. Robotic turrets are the future. Three or four well placed and armed turrets can do far more damage. Imagine trying to outsmart those after the wars are over.

Turret hunters.

@FrankenPC: Easy. Most turret's main weakness is the lack of 4D 360 Total movement. Just drop a bomb from 90degrees directly above. Or dig it out underneath.

@FrankenPC: Move real slowly? Cover yourself in mud? Spray CO2 extinguishers? Dress in a furry suit? Dress in a dry suit? Death from above? Mortars?

@cde: Damn, forgot death from below.

@cde: even with overlapping fields of fire that prevent simply outflaking a stationary turret the fact that it's robitc opens up the possiblity of simply fooling its sense receptors.

Robot turrets are sexy sure... (well sexy in a weapons sense)..

But mines are Q&D (also C&D).
Quick and dirty
(or cheap and dirty).

For the cost three or four robot turrets you could make what like thousands of mines? Millions?

Robot turrets are for field of fire.

Mines are for area deterrence.

Also, turrets presume some sort of ammunition. Just wave targets they can't ignore at them until they run out of ammo.

BTW, the album beneath the cover that that picture is ripped from (Kevin Devine, Put your Ghost to Rest) is fucking incredible.

@FrankenPC:

Mines have the advantage that I can make them at home, and I'm a college drop-out menial laborer. This is also why the 'landmine ban' is a silly idea. Kinda like that time they outlawed war.
-Kle.

Have managed to read the first few pages out of Big Brother's view. This looks great! Am more of a dog person than a weapons wonk but hey, whatever floats your boat (then sinks it).

@Ryan H: You see Kill bots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them, until they reached their limit and shutdown.

Good, good story.

I love this story.

Also, I am a dog person.

@Git Em SteveDave:

Same can be said for land mines. Drop a block of C4 on a mined area and watch the concussion detonate all of the mines.

I don't know. Would the compression wave be that great above the ground? I would you think you would have to bury it a little. You could wait till winter for the ground to squeeze the mines so they blow.

@FrankenPC: What I mean is I know they have a thing that deploys off landing crafts that trails some c4 and primacord that blasts a 4-5 foot swath of all land mines, but the width is so small. To explode a large amount of mines, you would need a crap load of c4.

@Git Em SteveDave:
True. Like a net. Small nodes of C4 strung out in a web. Throw the web over the area to be cleansed and detonate it. I don't know if C4 would outright crush the mines like aluminum cans or detonate them.

The kinetic energy of RDX (explosive component of Composition 4) is astounding. It's nothing at all like the gasoline explosions you see in Hollywood movies. The shockwave moves at 18,000 Miles/Hr. That's enough to suck the air out of pretty much any enclosed object and crush it, or explode it.

@Git Em SteveDave: Using CO2 Extinguishers only work on Tremors, duh!

@FrankenPC: Depends on how the concussion wave is formed. Different High Explosives have different needs for primary detonators. Like how you can't detonate dynamite with cannon fuse, you need a blasting cap. But a concussion wave would probably trigger a compression switch.

Better yet, you can use ultrasonic generators to trigger the landmines. So instead of dropping a bomb, you have a plane with a sizable dish pointed straight down, doing sweeps to trigger them all.

@Git Em SteveDave:

You're thinking of Viper and Giant Viper. It's a rocket that trails a big sock full of explosives behind it, and then detonates the sock once it's at full extension. This clears a lane through the minefield. It involves a lot of kaboom, and while it might not detonate all the mines, it at least upsets them (can be important for anti-vehicle mines) and wrecks a lot of the fuses.

There are also some FAE lane-clearing devices.
-Kle.

@Klebert L. Hall: Then again, what CAN'T you do w/a nice FAE device?

@Git Em SteveDave:

Souffle ?
-Kle.

Not all mines detonate after a single compression switch activation event; they can be built with a variety of "explode now" conditions. Further, as they age, their performance becomes unpredictable. Put N mines in a field and wait M years, and even if they were never *designed* to detonate only the third time someone strolls over them, nevertheless that's what a percentage of them are going to do. Hence, while there are a variety of simple and obvious solutions, they tend to to simple, obvious, and wrong.

As you'd expect, the "Land mine" article at [en.wikipedia.org] is a useful read.

@cde:

Or use high power microwaves. You can vaporize the explosive material with enough power.