2016/05/17

Modern self-protection smoke; examples

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I don't want to pass on these; a (marketing) brochure with nice images of smoke effect in visible and IR spectrum and lots of specs about delay time, spectrum coverage, munition weight.



Such munitions are for launchers as these, of which there aren't enough mounted on combat vehicles and usually none are mounted on non-combat vehicles. Reloading under armour is always impossible and such launchers are almost never bulletproofed, which they should be. I think this category is underrated for armoured vehicles, 'soft' vehicles and dismounted personnel.

Smoke is also very useful for protecting areas against PGMs; the only fallback option in face of a combination of successful radar jamming, SatNav jamming and multispectral smoke is to use either dumb or inertial navigation munitions. Smoke was already used to conceal industrial point targets back during the Second World War.

RP (red phosphorous) has WP (white phosphorous) as an intermediate product and is accordingly more expensive, as far as I know it's roughly twice as expensive. It is less troublesome and appears to be the agent of choice for multispectral (visible and IR) smoke agents, though some alternatives were tested and produced as well. RP smoke isn't affecting thermal sensors for long, though. The longer smoke durations require continued burning of additional material.

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