Poll- Favorite Light AT Weapon

[pmulcahy11b]

Originally Posted by HaplessOperator

Well, now I'm curious. Did you swing and miss?

During Desert Storm, I fired a Dragon at a BMP-1, aiming for the turret ring from the side. I hit down low on the side, blowing off a couple of roadwheels and breaking the track, but that and the engine took up most of the Dragon's impact. The BMP skidded wide, and a couple of guys finished it off with AT4 rockets.

I was standing in a ditch when I fired. That probably led to Unintentional Grounding -- when you're not in a solid seated firing position, the sudden loss of weight on your shoulder when the missile leaves the tube can cause your shoulder to suddenly rise a little -- and the missile flies into the ground, or into the suspension in my shot's case.

[kcdusk]

What about AT mines? Would they count as a light AT weapon?

Has anyone used them in their games? I imagine in real life they are fairy common?

[HaplessOperator]

Originally Posted by kcdusk

What about AT mines? Would they count as a light AT weapon?

Has anyone used them in their games? I imagine in real life they are fairy common?

They are, in a sense, but they fall into a distinctly different efferent use case than what's being implied in the post.

In real life, no, not so much. Mines aren't exactly common to begin with, and are generally handled by your brigade's or regiment's combat engineering component. They also don't get used all that often, since they're generally part of a fairly narrow use-case defensive policy, and if the brigade is functioning anywhere remotely normally, it's not exactly sitting in one spot and simply waiting for a hostile mechanized force to drive through them as they xlcede ground, mining the hell out of an area isn't going to do much more than create a hazard to your own forces and follow-on forces in addition to generating additional work and man-hours in de-mining the things.

We also don't really keep all that many manually-emplaced mines in inventory these days, on top of AT mines being heavy as hell; the M19s weigh almost as much as an AT4. Last bit is that the ou don't generally just want anti-tank mines; their placement generally requires its own field of anti-personnel measures to keep the anti-tank mines from being disturbed.

Closest thing to a mine that most infantry ever see are Claymores.