Weapons
Exocet in Stanley
Exocet – Land-based firing by MM38 battery at Hooker’s Point, near Stanley, that hit and damaged HMS Glamorgan 12th June. Stanley airfield in the background. DANIEL BECHENNEC By this time the general intelligence assessment was that Argentina had accepted that the military defence of the Falklands was inevitable and that Great Britain must be dragged to the negotiating table by…
Most Recent
Combat Issues – Chinese Chariots
Fighting from a moving chariot would have been difficult at best, given the bumping and jarring, not to mention the fleeting moment when a shock weapon could be brought to bear against nearby fighters on the ground or used to strike warriors in an oncoming vehicle. Thus the exceptional accomplishments…
Railguns
Railguns are being researched as weapons with projectiles that do not contain explosives, but are given extremely high velocities: 3,500 m/s (11,500 ft/s, approximately Mach 10 at sea level) or more (for comparison, the M16 rifle has a muzzle speed of 930 m/s, or 3,050 ft/s), which would make their…
Roman Shipboard Weapons I
 Rams The earliest rams, which emerged in the mid-ninth century BC, transformed warfare on water from an encounter between armed men on vessels, to a battle between the vessels themselves for the ram made the ship that mounted it into the weapon, a guided missile no less. The earliest…
Roman Shipboard Weapons II
 Grapnels such as this, attached to lengths of rope, were thrown to ensnare an enemy ship and to pull it close enough to enable it to be boarded. A variation of this was attached to a shaft (the harpax) which could be shot from an artillery piece for longer…
Junkers Ju 52 – DEMIANSK
DEMIANSK OFFENSIVE OPERATION (MARCH 6–APRIL 9, 1942) A failed Red Army offensive conducted by Briansk Front. The conception for the ground campaign was both audacious and ferocious. It aimed at replicating the German encirclements of Red Army troops that marked the five-month battle before Moscow that began in November 1941.…
ISU ASSAULT GUNS INÂ ACTION
A Soviet GAZ-MM 4 x 2 cargo truck drives past a line of ISU-152 assault guns in Lvov, in the Ukraine, in July 1944. The photograph gives a good view of the chassis’ running gear, with KV-l’s spoked wheels rather than the disc wheels used on the T-34 and its…