dunc Posted December 1, 2000 Share Posted December 1, 2000 ok, are we all ready for a laugh? well, someone I know who is quite well up on WW2 etc, told me that tanks often had lightning conductors on top to stop the occupants from getting frazzled if they got struck by lightning. Now i'm pretty sure that this person is telling the truth, because they aren't usually jokers, so I was just wondering if anyone else had heard of this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bruno Weiss Posted December 2, 2000 Share Posted December 2, 2000 Well yes, as a matter of fact this did come about when it was revealed in a past CM thread that Soviet gunners who caught onto the fear that Tiger tank crews had of lightning would position the "crash-booms" 76mm AT's (hidden ofcourse), and then rattle sheets of tin while tossing buckets of water through large fans yelling "whoooosh". Thus flushing the Tigers into the open where they could then be picked off at will. It became known to the Red Army as the "Boltinski Uparski" tactic. ------------------ "Gentlemen, you may be sure that of the three courses open to the enemy, he will always choose the fourth." -Field Marshal Count Helmuth von Moltke, (1848-1916) [This message has been edited by Bruno Weiss (edited 12-01-2000).] Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mark IV Posted December 2, 2000 Share Posted December 2, 2000 I'm not sure how this would work... A tank already is a lightning "conductor", being made of steel, and usually in direct metal contact with earth ground (even if the tracks have rubber pads, off-road there is going to be a lot of metal-to-earth contact). In theory it isn't the worse place to be in lightning, since the charge tends to run on the outside "skin" of any object as it flows to ground. The less resistance it encounters in the process, the better. An AFV would be a pretty efficent Faraday Cage, where the interior of a charged vessel is protected from the charge by the conductor itself- no electrostatic field exists inside the externally charged container. Airplanes frequently get struck in flight without harm to the occupants for exactly this reason. It would be better not to get struck at all, so the lower the profile, the better. Your conductor could only raise the profile, increasing the likelihood of a strike, unless it channeled the surge through a different path to ground than the AFV itself. This is difficult to picture on a vehicle. You could trail chains to improve contact with the earth, I guess... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Raze Posted December 2, 2000 Share Posted December 2, 2000 Gosh. All this time I thought those chains were for detonating mines . ------------------ "The art of fighting without fighting..." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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