Silencer.
;)
Awright, awright, the tracks are blocky (which I noted) AND the friggin’ back is blocky. Nitpickers!
H.
That doesn’t look like Iraq. ;)
That’s because we secretly invaded Norway. Thus, the silencer.
I thought those road posts looked familiar.
A sufficiently powerful tornado moving slowly enough would disintegrate the tank and no one would know there ever was a tank there.
You canna destroy matter, laddie!
Given that tanks can be flipped from being shot by other tanks, I think it’s possible that a tank could be flipped by a tornado.
That said, it certainly would be one of the safest places to be in a tornado.
Err… Why the hell are you and your wife arguing about this, of all things?
(and I put my money on the tank)
If three people tied to a fence wearing goggles could go through a tornado, look up into it and survive out the other side, the tornado couldn’t do squat to a tank, hollywood says.
I think there’s a distinct possibility. I was leaning that way just off my gut reaction, having seen damage done by a LOT of tornadoes, and having recently visited Greensburg, KS after it was hit a few months ago, and seeing the size of some F4s and F5s. After reading about some of the train cars, I’m more convinced. The swirling motion of the wind in a tornado makes me think it could get under a tank easily enough. Don’t know that it’d pick it up and toss it around, but I think it would at least roll it, if not even toss it a short distance.
She was watching a tornado show re-run on NatGeo and made the comment a tornado could destroy almost anything. I said, “Not an M1 Abrams tank. It’s way too heavy and dense for its profile”.
See, I can understand a tornado picking up a 110 ton train car, but the dynamics are so different there. There’s tons of open space inside the cabin of the car, and it’s density is probably a few orders of magnitude less than an M1 Abrams tank.
Think of it like this. What floats in water? A 1-ton chunk steel won’t float in water, but carve it out and and increase its surface area, and it will float Quite nicely. In a tornado you have the forces of air pressure, wind and suction.
My personal feeling is the Abrams tank and it’s several tons of Chobham armor make it too dense for its surface area to be lifted more than an inch, and simply can’t be flipped. Sure a “blast” from anti-tank missile might be able to do it on occasion, but a tornado’s damage is not about a
single punch", but more about continued exertion. If you examine the amount of energy in a sabot round hitting a tank at the millisecond level and compare it to the same area of effect for the same amount of time in a tornado, the tornado loses.
As a note - we weren’t considering “any tank”, because tanks can be super light as well as insanely heavy. Just the M1A1 Abrams.
The swirling motion of the wind in a tornado also makes it the world’s largest blender, with dirt, sand, and other debris doing the damage here. I mean, you’ve got engine blocks, tree trunks, school buses and what have you slamming into the tank at 200mph. If enough of the tank is blasted away by a tornado beating down on it, it might become light enough to become airborne.
So really, the question is “Will it Blend?”
So if your wife…weighs the same as a train car…SHE’S A TANK! BURN HER!
jpinard - I agree that it’s a question of mass divided by surface area (more or less), and that the M1 is almost certainly much more massive, per unit of surface area/liftable surface than the train. But, OTOH, if the tornado that damage the trains was F3 and a F5 tornado is much more severe, then I think it’s at least moderately possible that a F5 could lift an M1 a few feet and flip it.
A side note - according to this Wikipedia article, the US has just changed the measurement scale for tornados.
Is this an African or European tornado?
A girl said this to me once. TRUE STORY!
Well, maybe not.
You said that to your wife and she did more than just roll her eyes at you?
Alternatively,
It’s way too heavy and dense for its profile
That’s what she said.
Its the bore evaculator. It pulls all the nasty gases out after a round is fired so when the loader opens the breech, everybody in the turret doesn’t get a face full of various toxic gases.
See? That’s basically what a silencer does.