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To: NorseViking; ought-six
Literally, defective American bombs were the only reason why most of their fleet wasn’t sunk.

I think it had less to do with "defective" American bombs, and more to do with the Argentines. The Argies had lots of bombs, but few Snake Eyes. The Snake Eye attaches to tail of a dumb bomb, and slows its fall, allowing the bomber to drop it at a low altitude, and zoom off to safety before the bomb explodes. The Navy used some Snake Eyes. Not sure about the Air Force.

Without Snake Eyes, the Argies had to fall back on setting a timer, electronic, or controlled by a spinning fan blade, on their bombs, preventing them from exploding until several seconds after release, so that their high speed, low level, attacks did not become de-facto kamikaze missions. The problem was that the successful Argie pilots were using attack profiles that were right up on the edge of suicidal, and dropping their bombs so closely to the British ships that they often did not arm before impact. It is accepted by everyone, including the Brits, that if all the Argie bombs had detonated, the Brits would have sailed away.

As a side note, per scale this war was rather pathetic.

ought-six:

NorseViking's stage four Russophilia blinds him to the fact that Russia could never, in its history, have launched a successful invasion of the Canary Islands, much less the Falklands. And given that the Russian Army has finally found something that it can do, he is of course convinced that doing it represents the pinnacle of military development. Perhaps one day he will read a book about about the Second Battle of the Somme, and discover that over a century ago the Brits had worked out the idea of lining up several hundred artillery pieces per mile of front, and they were firing millions of shells a day, not tens of thousands.

91 posted on 06/19/2022 9:17:58 PM PDT by Pilsner
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To: Pilsner

Why should Russia invade Canary Islands?


92 posted on 06/19/2022 9:30:56 PM PDT by NorseViking
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