Oddest artillery weapon I've ever seen.

June 2, 2011 9:42 AM

Drum/barrel artillery? What was that and how did it work without killing anyone next to it?

So I just watched the (pretty decent and entertaining) movie Assembly, dealing with a small part of the post-WWII Chinese Civil War campaigns as seen from the Communist side. A detail that was to me pretty mindboggling was the use by the Communist defenders of some kind of empty drum/fuel barrel improvised artillery: the drum has a leg to rest on, so it's leaning forward, then the operator throws some kind of big explosives bag inside (first fuse lit, if I understand?), and after a minor explosion it gets propelled out and into the advacing enemy, where (on landing) a second and much much bigger explosion causes great butchering. Real weapon? What's the name of the thing? Why didn't it blow the operators and the drums to pieces right there instead of oomphing nicely into the advancing Nationalist troops?

posted by Iosephus to technology (13 answers total)

Here's a picture from the movie showing the improvised mortars.
posted by jedicus at 9:48 AM on June 2, 2011

How heavy are the actual "rounds" being shot ? And what's the propellant ?

As a kid, I made a much smaller, but similar contraption to shoot wads of paper. (I wasn't up to a potato gun). Take a few coke cans, trim ends, duct tape together, spritz hair spray in, stuff paper in, light pilot hole, pop. Didn't go great distances (20 feet might have been my record), but the whole contraption didn't assplode on me either.
posted by k5.user at 10:12 AM on June 2, 2011

The "rounds" looked like a cloth bag covered by a thin rope mesh of sorts, size more or less like a briefcase is my guess. No idea about the propellant, they only showed a fuse running from a corner of the bag (fuse length like a feet or so, again my guess). There was a mention of dynamite being used by the Communist troops, for instance a pretty similar bag (big bigger perhaps) was used by a soldier, who crawled next to a tank, stuffed it into its tracks and lit it. It pretty much wrecked the tank and cooked its personnel, it was implied.
posted by Iosephus at 10:34 AM on June 2, 2011

big -> bit
posted by Iosephus at 10:35 AM on June 2, 2011

I have no idea if the movie weapons actually existed, but the IRA used improvised mortars made from propane cylinders.
posted by zamboni at 11:11 AM on June 2, 2011

The Wikipedia entry for Mortars has a section on Improvised Mortars. The article doesn't go into a detailed explanation of their operation but implies they are a one-use thing, so I assume whatever propellant charge thing is going off is not easily replaceable.

Maybe they are launching some sort of satchel charge?
posted by Jinkeez at 11:14 AM on June 2, 2011

I can't view imfdb from work unfortunately but there are a lot of problems with this concept. A lit fuse might be extinguished by the explosion that launches the projectile. The weapon has no rifling for spin-stabilisation in combination with the short barrel is going to give terrible accuracy.

It could be extremely dangerous since the forged steel barrels used in actual mortars are able to resist the expansion of gasses and lob a hefty projectile quite some distance without bursting.
posted by longbaugh at 11:38 AM on June 2, 2011

Real weapon; it's what the PLA called 飞雷 (flying mines) back in the day (the Nationalists called them 没良心炮 - 'cannon without conscience'). Basically it fired mines or as Jinkeez suggests, a satchel charge of about 10kg of gunpowder. There's a documentary about them in Chinese here - they were fired by the engineering corps rather than artillery troops, and the main bloke named as inventing them is 聂佩璋 Nie Peizhang, an officer in the engineers during the Huaihai campaign. Says here that often they'd kill people by the shock of the explosion alone, leaving no obvious injury but the victim bleeding from all orifices.
posted by Abiezer at 11:53 AM on June 2, 2011 [4 favorites]

Judging by the photo, I'd speculate that the barrel(s) were used more as an aiming device than an actual mortar, as the fit between the projectile and the tube walls needs to be pretty tight in order for the rifling, and thus the aim, to work correctly as well as propel the projectile with the assistance of the hot gases generated by the propellant, whereas with a 55 gallon drum you're mostly hoping that the projectile will a) be expelled from the device at a high enough speed in order to put distance between you and it and b) it will travel in an expected direction.

Such a device can work if there's wadding between the propellant and the projectile (satchel charge or whatever). The walls of the barrel don't have to be that thick if it's for one or two uses. The thickness of current mortar tubes depends on the heat dissipation properties of the materials used and the ability for an infantry mortar crew to carry it, along with the proper-sized baseplate, bipod and aiming device. PVC pipe has been used to create IED's as well. Undetectable, maleable and strong enough for a one-use weapon.

I'm thinking the movie people may have made some adjustments to make it work.
posted by jsavimbi at 11:55 AM on June 2, 2011

The REF (Relative Explosive Force) of a black powder satchel charge is pretty limited iirc - around 0.6 compared to 1.0 for TNT. That's not going to generate a lot of force, even with 10kg of powder. You'd need to land that pretty damn close to kill someone, literally within a couple of metres.

I reckon that you'll find it's just a smoothbore, not rifled at all and more of a harrassment weapon that anything else.
posted by longbaugh at 12:00 PM on June 2, 2011

Awesome, thanks all!
posted by Iosephus at 12:28 PM on June 2, 2011

Why didn't it blow the operators and the drums to pieces right there instead of oomphing nicely into the advancing Nationalist troops?

Generally speaking, that kind of improvised weapon is nearly as much of a danger to its operators as it is to the enemy, and the crew often do suffer because of that. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and all that.

There's an improvised cannon in the movie "55 Days in Peking" and it does eventually blow up and kill its crew. (Credit to the filmmakers for that piece of verisimilitude.)
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 12:57 PM on June 2, 2011

in the movie "55 Days in Peking"

I think it was the one piece of verisimilitude that Samuel Bronston used in the film. I've seen it a bunch of times, albeit not recently, and I cannot say that it was very accurate.

Funny thing that, the movie was made in the town I grew up in, right outside of Madrid. Nothing much came of Bronston's idea to create a studio there and as kids we used to ride our bikes over to the location and smash the leftover plaster statues and such into even smaller pieces. A lot of the locals were used as Chinese extras and were proud of their participation in Hollywood.
posted by jsavimbi at 2:01 PM on June 2, 2011