The United States will soon provide antipersonnel mines to Ukraine, a U.S. official confirmed late Tuesday, in a move that followed Ukraine’s first deployment of long-range U.S.-supplied ballistic missiles in an attack on Russia.
The United States will soon provide antipersonnel mines to Ukraine, a U.S. official confirmed late Tuesday, in a move that followed Ukraine’s first deployment of long-range U.S.-supplied ballistic missiles in an attack on Russia.
Oh goody! Let us sit and watch as they seed the soil with death in waiting for uninvolved civilians for the next 50 years.
From the article…
“The official also pointed to the function of the mines, which they said require a battery for operation and will not detonate once the battery runs out after a period of a few hours to a few weeks.”
That’s brilliant engineering but also…I wonder how common some kind of reverse-dud would be?
“Oh cool it’s probably inert because that was MONTHS ag–”
Batteries are bounded by more predictable chemistry more so than something like the breakdown of a mechanical based trigger waiting for rust or decomposition. Chemistry makes it easier to model and predict. If you’ve got a 1Ah battery and it consumes x watt hours per hour, then it takes y days to burn through. Tolerances that cause the battery to have slightly more or less capacity or component power consumption will likely be <5%, thus not radically different because nobody is timing this to the minute.
You’re absolutely right. Very good points! I thought that too, a major improvement over analogue mechanisms that have more unpredictable longevity!
I suppose if the batteries are actively discharging as a failsafe, that makes sense.
I was thinking about how sometimes you’d pick up like, a TV remote that’s been sitting since 1993 and astonishingly the little red light blinks when you push a button, if only faintly, and for a second.