Sorta-OT: Movies and Electronic Design

Not much use for an unrepaired, bombed out structre. The fire brigades were there to keep it from spreading to other buildings. If the building was stone or brick, the fire would damage the mortar anyway.

How about the unexploded bombs found years or decades later?

It was more for the nuisance factor preventing roads from being used and tying down specialists. Bomb disposal guys got pretty good at it. It wasn't until 1943 that there were fuzes that were actually designed to kill the bomb disposal officers working on them.

It also made it harder for firefighters if there was the odd UXB nearby then they would sometimes have to leave buildings to burn.

They blitzed plenty of other major UK cities as well with the same MO.

German engineering and poor quality control in the same sentence you just have to be kidding! The time fuses were deliberate and effective.

UXBs were a huge nuisance after a night raid since they had to be treated as if they were potentially about to explode until disarmed. They used various delay fuses some chemical, some clockwork and a few with fancy anti tamper mechanisms. The bomb disposal people that got very good at their job were moved to training others how to do it.

There are collectors of German bomb fuzes eg.

It meant that any failed munitions would also be treated as serious threats and tie up resources preventing roads from being used etc.

Every now and then the odd WWII bomb comes to light in a building site and has to be decommissioned. The now very elderly explosive has to be assumed to be a bit volatile to err on the safe side.

Known as the "Joshua (or Jericho) Trumpet".

Not nice to be on the receiving end.

On the plus side, Stukas weren't difficult for a Spitfire, or Hurricane, or Mustang, to shoot down. They worked well in the European Blitzkrieg, and the Russian campaign, not so well in the Battle of Britain.

There was a war of wits between the British BD people, and the German designers of yet more ingeniously deadly booby trap devices.

"Butterfly" bombs were particularly evil. Designed to kill or maim unwitting civilians. Almost always had to be detonated in situ.

There are several areas in the US that were used to train bomber pilots that have soem unexploded bombs. The land was federal property at the time, and few records were kept. Some developer built a subdivision on one such area years ago, and the Army Corp of Engineers had to check the area for unexploded bombs, and other munitons.

They still have a drop zone in the Ocala National Forest where they drop dummy bombs, and a couple morons were caught trying to sell some they stole as scrap metal, last year.

I reckon the all time classic (which is still being done) is the old "Hit the fire alarm button" whereupon all the sprinklers come on.

There was a very bad Sci-Fi movie on Antenna TV tonight. Three hours of mistakes, made in 1969 and titled 'Marooned'.

USAF have a particularly bad reputation in the UK for not being able to find a target and hit it reliably. They also used to prang widowmakers into the East Anglian marshes with monotonous regularity. The SR-71s were very impressive though on take off and final approach.

Even today the USAF are pretty sloppy about dropping munitions in entirely the wrong place a long way from the Otterburn practice range:

In pre GPS days the US display team were notorious for being heard but not seen at the small grass runway Barton Airshow near Manchester and on one occasion were about to start their display lined up with the much larger and busy Ringway civilian airport about 10 miles away.

I quote from an ATC of that era (this one a Woodford RAFA airshow):

The F 1/11 did its fast pass at Manchester instead of at the Woodford airshow. I did my RT exam in 1978 with the controller who was on 'Manchester Approach' that day. He told me he saw the primary return coming across the Pennines at several miles per 'paint', and soon realised it was headed for Ringway instead of Woodford. It was, of course, on the Woodford frequency so the Manchester controller picked up his phone to advise Woodford of the situation. As he did so, he heard the roar of its low pass past his tower!

It missed an approaching Vanguard east of Stockport, and a Viscount climbing out over Knutsford, did a big 'U' turn, and went back east, home and probably unaware of his mistake (until he landed at base!).

The USAF could often not find Barton - the RAF always did. Some US display aircraft went fuel critical trying to find us, so never got to the show, and one F 1/11 did one fast pass, turned left, and lost the field. He never found it again before he had to go home due fuel critcality

Civilian aircraft like Concorde had no difficulty in finding either Woodford or Barton airfields reliably every time. Concorde pilots had a trick of coming in quietly and switching to full power and afterburners about half way along the strip. Every car alarm went crazy.

I really don't give a f*ck.

Europe has been at peace now for over 60 years, unprecented in the last few millenia. This Pax Americana thing is expensive, but seems to work.

How about explosions in space? Any and all explosions?

Of course, I'll admit that I have no idea what a weightless explosion in a vacuum _should_ look like, but I'm fairly certain that it won't involve puffy clouds of smoke billowing out or flames that burn "upward".

S'funny... this seems like a MythBusters natural, but I don't think theyve ever done a show on what substances do... or do not... make nice, exciting explosions in space. Maybe NASA launches are outside their budget?

Frank McKenney

We should pull all our troops out, kick out the UN and NATO, along with every other agreement with these idiots and be prepared to nuke all major cities of any country that starts a war. No foreign aid, no subsidies or favorite nation trading. Go isolationist for a few hundred years and make it a mandatory death penalty to sneak into the country.

Destroy you enemy. Every man, woman and child so that they never rise against you again.

They are just very slightly more symmetrical than they would be under gravity, and the bits just keep going in a straight line and don't fall downwards in a parabola. The rate of energy release in an explosion is such that gravity is only a minor bit player in the early dynamics.

There are plenty of examples of extremely large explosions in space to study - the brightest one being the supernova remnant Cass A.

It isn't quite spherically symmetrical because the star was spinning and losing mass from its equatorial bulge before it went pop.

They are widely studied as standard candles that can be seen from almost the edge of the observable universe. A single type II supernova at its brightest can outshine an entire galaxy for a few days.

It is the burning paraffin flames that look the strangest in space!

Fire in space is much more interesting although dangerous to play with. Without gravity to move air into the burn zone it becomes a diffusion limited spherical shell burn front and progresses slowly.

Scale model people do a great job with dimensional analysis to make things behave approximately right for full scale but some things like smoke and the wetness of water are not so amenable to being cheated. Basically they film it at a different rate to actual playback to make it look right for the full scale real world.

It is generally considered very bad form to explode things in Earth orbit since the fragments produced can damage other satellites.

Here in the desert of California, there are several still active target ranges, as well as quite a few 'decommissioned' ones. There is an area in the Anza Borrego National Forest that is still off limits, as well as an area of the Chocolate Mountains that Patton used as a gunnery range...

Taxpayers don't want to spend the money to 'safe' those old ranges, then complain that they are closed off. They can't have it both ways. :(

Well, as I understand it, they have 'safed' these areas... several times, and each time they find stuff that wasn't found before! The terrain here is pretty wild, up and down, with fun flora and fauna to deal with as well as summer temps in the 110's!

The only way to really 'safe' it is with bulldozers to turn up every square inch as deep as they can be embedded with their weight & speed at impact. :(

They sit in a high power LASER fitted tank a couple thousand feet away and detonate ordinance from a distance with the laser. There are no bulldozers on ANY ranges where there is ANY chance that live ordinance still exists.