h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The posting does concentrate on personal military weapons...

Just wondering if it could be broadened to include equipment such as tanks (must be plenty of scope for catastrophe there!) or air-to-ground laser guided, computer controlled missiles? Anybody know anything about these?

The idiom "to err is human, to really f**k up it takes a computer" springs to mind!

Wibble.
Less of a name, more of a wardrobe...

Hmmmn: tanks.

Those things were dangerous enough WITHOUT actually firing anything (or indeed driving about).

Witness lost fingernails from track bashing (changing the tension in the tracks) or from the traverse monster (which ate things like pens and bits of soldiers when turning the turret).

I will not go into the story of an unfortunate who fell through an open hatch and ended up with the tip of an APFSDS round (like a big dart) up a sensitive part of his anatomy !

I'm not boasting but -

Ref TANKS try my pending entry 'Tanks -the flipside'

In the manner of Mr Burns... Excellent.

That was just what I was expecting! (Although never having been inside a tank, I don't quite know *how* I was expecting it!?!)

Agreed- an enjoyable entry which brought back some memories !

One other thing on the road (which infuriated the Germans) was when driving too close to kerb. The lugs at the end of the track links caught under the kerbstones, tore them out and threw them about with surprising velocity...

Also in the last days of the big NATO exercises vast compensation was paid out to farmers for any damage to land or buildings with no questions asked. Tank crews were bribed with fresh food (often in short supply) to knock over walls, drive vehicles through fields etc. End result a happy, well fed crew who had just had a chance to break things; a well-compensated farmer; but a potentially annoyed taxpayer who had to shell out for the "damage"

I remember that! We accidently tore half the side of a bus once - and never even heard it!

Another story of kerbstones was Cloud's Hill Corner outside Bovington, on the road circuit. When turning left towards Bovvy, there always seened to be a cloud of white smoke behind you. Actually it was the track pins hitting the kerb. All corners aound Bovington had grooves in them from these track pins.

Can I quote:-

i) the unfortunate tendency of the Gatling Gun (first practical machine gun design of 1862)to over-heat to the point where not only did rounds cook off in the chamber, it ignited rounds in the hopper waiting to be fed into the machine... this could set off a chain of calamity that made it most dangerous to the crew firing it.

ii) Well, these too are military weapons... the German U-boat captain operating in Arctic waters who saw a tasty target, lined it up, and ordered "fire all tubes". What this hapless captain had forgotten was that the motors and guidance systems on standard German torpedoes needed to be recalibrated to be accurate in colder less saline waters (maybe any submariners out there could explain this?)The result was, he fired torpedoes and then proceeded on full ahead.
In the meantime, the hopelessly inaccurate torpedoes he'd just fired went through a full 180 degree arc, and were re-united with their parent vessel a few hundred yards further on... survivors who were picked up by the British ship that had been the intended target were, understandably, quite indignant about this.

Or if we are talking tanks, the early models of German Panthers, that had the petrol tank right up against the hottest part of the engine.

(Petrol doesn't boil for very long, you see...)

And British soldiers out on excercises who have to sleep rough in the field are taught, with suitable behavioural modifiers (ie, applied pain)NOT to even think of getting underneath a parked tank or other tracked vehicle to sleep, however hard the rain. The reason being that sixty tons of tank will naturally sink under its own weight right down to its belly plates, with con sequences for anyone caught betwixt tank and ground...

And while on the subject of tanks, the Russian T-54 and T-60 had a design flaw. To make life easier for the loader and speed rate of fire, the main gun had an automatic reloading system that could line up three or four rounds at a time. However, problems occured when the loader had to replenish the sutomatic firing mechanism with fresh rounds. If while reloading the gunner spotted a target of opportunity, the loading mechanism was perfectly capable of trying to load and fire the hapless crewman's right arm... to this day there are a goodly number of one-armed ex-tankies in Russia, as well as in the client states upon whom the duff tanks were hastily off-loaded in a spirit of socialist brotherhood and generosity......