Flamethrowers have a more limited range and the fuel they use isnt size efficient.
Tanks that used flamethrowers needed a trailer to carry the fuel and propellant, that needless to say is vulnerable to enemy fire.
Canister is carried internally just like the rest of the ammunition, besides that the kind of targets you can use canister on are more varied than viable flame thrower targets.
/thread.
thermobaric bombs kill quick though so they lack the fear factor of flamethrowers. seeing a flamethrower on the battlefield may save lives due to surrender
Seeing a flamethrower on the field means you take your rifle and shoot the guy with the flame thrower, they are 70lbs, have a range of 120 feet and firing it tells everyone within a kilometer where you are standing.
moron a flamethrower has the opportunity cost of carrying a huge ass backpack and flammable fuel with you. (I know they don't explode like in Hollywood but they aren't fucking safe either)
A canister shot has the opportunity cost of "hey you think we could use some of our anti infantry shells as giant shotgun shells?"
Flamethrowers are just not worth the drawbacks, canister shells have no real drawbacks.
Flamethrowers also aren't overly safe in training.
I remember reading a report about an idiot shooting one up in the air, with the flames obviously coming back down.
The instructor rushed to him to save him but the heat of the fire made the guys hand clench activating the flamethrower again killing both iirc.
>I remember reading a report about an idiot shooting one up in the air, with the flames obviously coming back down.
If anyone is wondering about this, movie flamethrowers like picrel are basically just gussied up roofing torches that burn off all their fuel immediately. The real McCoy is basically a firehose for burning gel that sticks to everything. The point of it is that the gel reaches the target bunker intact and stays burning so all the oxygen gets replaced with poison fumes. It wouldn't work as intended if there wasn't burning fuel to come back down... so don't fire them upwards.
>bro that is not the case, vehicle borne flamethrowers can easily triple that range. Still very limited compared to canister.
Any vehicle that can fire the cannister has a main gun that can smoke that flamethrower vehicle with an AT round at 2km away. Worse still, the average infantry squad has anti-tank weapons that can kill it at twice the range. They are insanely vulnerable.
Flamethrowers have always been a weapon used near exclusively as in an anti-fortification role. its not something carried into open battle it is brought up when needed. Outside of very, very specific circumstances it is suicidal because it has an incredibly short range and advertises its firers location to everyone, even in those circumstances casualties were high.
Flamethrowers went by the wayside because we found better ways of destroying fortification from longer distances. The flamethrower was never about fear, that is just a byproduct of its real job, a job it has been replaced in.
Listen you dumb moron.
I was refuting the claim that flame throwers are as short ranged as anon claimed, not advocating for their use.
Jesus fucking christ.
Right. And typically not even carried by rifleman but combat engineers to reduce strong points that were otherwise isolated but holding out. Since the infantry had already cleared the flanks the flamethrower could approach on a blind spot. Not really a frontal assault weapon like is usually shown but a second echelon specialist piece of engineering equipment.
Unfortunately engineers are fucking busy and valuable so the use case doesn't really make sense. Maybe in a tunnel combat situation but that's extremely niche and you're unlikely to build a TO&E over that. Especially when you can just dump 10 barrels of 110 octane avgas into the tunnel, wait five minutes, then throw your cig into the aperture
>bro that is not the case, vehicle borne flamethrowers can easily triple that range.
If you’re comparing vehicle flamethrower range, then you need to compare the range of other vehicle mounted weapons. Which are measured in km not m. That tells you everything.
Seeing a flamethrower on the field means you take your rifle and shoot the guy with the flame thrower, they are 70lbs, have a range of 120 feet and firing it tells everyone within a kilometer where you are standing.
Military flamethrowers have much MUCH longer range than you think. There's a photo somewhere of a WWII demo on a football field shooting the full 100yds
The piss ant numbers ITT are from toy flamethrowers like the X18 and brush burners, not an actual Military unit using napalm.
The real reason a flamethrower is useless to a modern military is logistics and supply. For the same weight and volume you could ship a hundred 40mm grenades which are much more versatile.
>The piss ant numbers ITT are from toy flamethrowers like the X18 and brush burners, not an actual Military unit using napalm.
The numbers in this thread are the range of the actual M2 flamethrower in US service.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M2_flamethrower
Please post your WW2 100 yard / 300 feet man-portable flamethrower, I would like to see it.
The last time flamethrowers were in service was WWII and they had a range of 40m max. You can hit a person with a pistol at that range. Let alone a rifle. The Sherman crocodile, while incredibly cool, only had a range of 120m. Even the M9 bazooka had triple the range. Go ahead, prove me wrong.
We have better tools for clearing bunkers and tunnels, better tools for foliage, and flamethrowers are easily countered outside their usable range which is low.
Uncle SAM has transferred military equipment and ammo of all types amounting to less than 50 billion dollars as at Jan 2023, which is about one year of Russia's defence budget. The effect was to completely turn the tide, wreck Russia's invasion plans built up for the past 7 years, and demolish decades of Cold War stockpiles.
Precision = efficiency. Efficiency is king. Some things don’t have to be ultra precise but even among things than can be imprecise, the ones closer to precision are better.
Yeah except a hobby drone isnt a 1940s era aircraft and cannister isnt a 1940s era machinegun.
Youve got a tank capable of shooting down low flying aircraft with its fire control system, but youd rather waste a missile orders of magnitude more expensive than a canister shell.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
>a hobby drone isnt a 1940s era aircraft and cannister isnt a 1940s era machinegun
It is, on a smaller scale >waste a missile
nope
Precision programmable autocannon shells are what everyone's racing for now, for good reason.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
Because they have expensive munitions to sell.
How does a tank detect a quad coptor from far enough away it will still be engageable with the tanks relatively modest maximum elevation and turret transverse? Hobby drones have a tiny signature.
Same way they do now, anything they cant detect themselves gets detected by another element and the information is relayed to them any number of ways.
There are several solutions for limited vertical travel of the primary armament, new armaments that can traverse that high or a secondary canon/ifv canon that can. Programable munitions are a complete waste on small drones when a burst of canister or flechette would do as well for less cost.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
>grorious nippon warrior no need expensive "radar fuzed" frak artirrery, is burrshit sord by cowardry american miritary industriar comprex >June 19, 1944
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
Explain to me and the other anons: how exactly are you going to hit a drone, flying at 2+ km altitude, with a buckshot cloud that can only reach about 1.2 km altitude (remember that range =/= altitude; range is horizontal, altitude is vertical) at best.
That's the whole point of flak shells like AHEAD (and similar): they're aerodynamic enough to reach 2.5+ km altitude before bursting into the buckshot cloud, and they do it in a controlled pattern.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
Gyrojet Canister Rounds
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
Gyrojet is an overcomplicated meme when 30/35 mm AHEAD exists.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
>Precision programmable autocannon shells
Maybe poor countries, but the US has laser SHORAD systems that mount to a Stryker that are far enough along that they're being put into the hands of the local chromosome hoarders to test and break. A dollar of gas/diesel per dead drone is far more cost effective then expensive shells.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
The US is going for 3P as well, because when you've ten times the budget of everyone else, whynotboth.jpg >The US basically plays Hoi4 with 25 research slots
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
Fair enough, though I would argue that they're pretty clearly an intermediate stopgap while DEWs are what the US actually wants to field for their ADN against meme drones. The autocannon rounds are probably intended to be dual purpose since there's that absolutely based video of the Bradley, I think?, sweeping a trench with airburst autocannon rounds, but if you've already got that capability to deal with ground troops, might as well give the gun the elevation and sensors to shoot up as well.
3 weeks ago
Anonymous
>sweeping a trench with airburst autocannon rounds
The first one that I recall is a Bundeswehr Puma
but I think American videos have come up too
You can also put one through a window and completely fuck up the insides. That's murder.
How does a tank detect a quad coptor from far enough away it will still be engageable with the tanks relatively modest maximum elevation and turret transverse? Hobby drones have a tiny signature.
Honestly?
Media coverage. Burning someone to death looks pretty horrific and costs you major PR points back home.
(Dying of being melted alive isn't much different to dying of being shot in the head but i don't make the rules)
A thermobaric warhead mostly does the same job as a flamethrower did in combat (burn and suffocate the enemy from defensive fortifications) far more efficiently. Any defoliating action can be done with napalm or agent orange from the air. Infantry troops would pretty much only use flamethrowers for clearing brush nowadays, which again can be done easily by other means.
Flame throwers have a very short range and I rather the guy I'm trying to kill die now instead of later. What scenario would a flamethrower be better then a bomb/grenade/bullet? Even against a tunnel system or bunker, I feel like a decent size grenade or bomb will do the trick over something like flamethrower.
Flamethrower's, in the traditional sense, are largely relegated to the dustbin for the reason of better and more effective things exist. Rockets or Missiles with incendiary payload carry the same capacity for destruction with putting the operators at far less potential risk.
Flamethrower tanks, such as the M67 "Zippo", required the sacrifice of the main gun, thus reducing the overall flexability in terms of targets it can effectively engage.
Canister is still viable since it's simply a type of ammunition and doesn't need a rework of a vehicles internals. If you don't need it, you take it out. It being an option doesn't take away from the overall effectiveness of a platform, which a cumbersome flamethrower system does.
Big shotgun kill
Flamethrowers have a more limited range and the fuel they use isnt size efficient.
Tanks that used flamethrowers needed a trailer to carry the fuel and propellant, that needless to say is vulnerable to enemy fire.
Canister is carried internally just like the rest of the ammunition, besides that the kind of targets you can use canister on are more varied than viable flame thrower targets.
/thread.
Flame weapons are not outdated, they just found better ways of delivering them than with military-grade super-soakers...
thermobaric bombs kill quick though so they lack the fear factor of flamethrowers. seeing a flamethrower on the battlefield may save lives due to surrender
Seeing a flamethrower on the field means you take your rifle and shoot the guy with the flame thrower, they are 70lbs, have a range of 120 feet and firing it tells everyone within a kilometer where you are standing.
>fear factor
Not of value compared to being able to kill that same enemy more reliably, at greater range, with less risk to real people (your guys).
I dunno bud really try to put yourself in the footage of those things, they look like they suck absolute dicks in person
>seeing a flamethrower on the battlefield may save lives due to surrender
Who cares?
Also
>sees a flamethrower on the battlefield
>backs up
What now? A weapon you can physically outrun has no place on a modern battlefield.
OP here, would like to further explain my reasoning
flamethrower
> extremely scary
canister
> poor mans airburst
What reasoning? Canister is to kill people efficiently which is also scary to survivors.
Canister is not poor man's airburst, it's horizontal fire. Why are you even on a weapons board?
He's probably one of the American right wing tourists shilling up the weapons board with stupid personal firearm threads
moron a flamethrower has the opportunity cost of carrying a huge ass backpack and flammable fuel with you. (I know they don't explode like in Hollywood but they aren't fucking safe either)
A canister shot has the opportunity cost of "hey you think we could use some of our anti infantry shells as giant shotgun shells?"
Flamethrowers are just not worth the drawbacks, canister shells have no real drawbacks.
Flamethrowers also aren't overly safe in training.
I remember reading a report about an idiot shooting one up in the air, with the flames obviously coming back down.
The instructor rushed to him to save him but the heat of the fire made the guys hand clench activating the flamethrower again killing both iirc.
>I remember reading a report about an idiot shooting one up in the air, with the flames obviously coming back down.
If anyone is wondering about this, movie flamethrowers like picrel are basically just gussied up roofing torches that burn off all their fuel immediately. The real McCoy is basically a firehose for burning gel that sticks to everything. The point of it is that the gel reaches the target bunker intact and stays burning so all the oxygen gets replaced with poison fumes. It wouldn't work as intended if there wasn't burning fuel to come back down... so don't fire them upwards.
What kind of shithole military thinks its purpose is to "scare" people, not to kill its enemies with efficiency and prejudice?
>flamethrowers
Range: 40 meters at best
>canister rounds
Range: YES
bro that is not the case, vehicle borne flamethrowers can easily triple that range. Still very limited compared to canister.
>vehicle flamethrower after panzerfausts
NGMI
>bro that is not the case, vehicle borne flamethrowers can easily triple that range. Still very limited compared to canister.
Any vehicle that can fire the cannister has a main gun that can smoke that flamethrower vehicle with an AT round at 2km away. Worse still, the average infantry squad has anti-tank weapons that can kill it at twice the range. They are insanely vulnerable.
Flamethrowers have always been a weapon used near exclusively as in an anti-fortification role. its not something carried into open battle it is brought up when needed. Outside of very, very specific circumstances it is suicidal because it has an incredibly short range and advertises its firers location to everyone, even in those circumstances casualties were high.
Flamethrowers went by the wayside because we found better ways of destroying fortification from longer distances. The flamethrower was never about fear, that is just a byproduct of its real job, a job it has been replaced in.
Listen you dumb moron.
I was refuting the claim that flame throwers are as short ranged as anon claimed, not advocating for their use.
Jesus fucking christ.
Right. And typically not even carried by rifleman but combat engineers to reduce strong points that were otherwise isolated but holding out. Since the infantry had already cleared the flanks the flamethrower could approach on a blind spot. Not really a frontal assault weapon like is usually shown but a second echelon specialist piece of engineering equipment.
Unfortunately engineers are fucking busy and valuable so the use case doesn't really make sense. Maybe in a tunnel combat situation but that's extremely niche and you're unlikely to build a TO&E over that. Especially when you can just dump 10 barrels of 110 octane avgas into the tunnel, wait five minutes, then throw your cig into the aperture
>bro that is not the case, vehicle borne flamethrowers can easily triple that range.
If you’re comparing vehicle flamethrower range, then you need to compare the range of other vehicle mounted weapons. Which are measured in km not m. That tells you everything.
Military flamethrowers have much MUCH longer range than you think. There's a photo somewhere of a WWII demo on a football field shooting the full 100yds
The piss ant numbers ITT are from toy flamethrowers like the X18 and brush burners, not an actual Military unit using napalm.
The real reason a flamethrower is useless to a modern military is logistics and supply. For the same weight and volume you could ship a hundred 40mm grenades which are much more versatile.
>The piss ant numbers ITT are from toy flamethrowers like the X18 and brush burners, not an actual Military unit using napalm.
The numbers in this thread are the range of the actual M2 flamethrower in US service.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M2_flamethrower
Please post your WW2 100 yard / 300 feet man-portable flamethrower, I would like to see it.
The last time flamethrowers were in service was WWII and they had a range of 40m max. You can hit a person with a pistol at that range. Let alone a rifle. The Sherman crocodile, while incredibly cool, only had a range of 120m. Even the M9 bazooka had triple the range. Go ahead, prove me wrong.
We have better tools for clearing bunkers and tunnels, better tools for foliage, and flamethrowers are easily countered outside their usable range which is low.
OP here totally forgot to mention this thread is about tank mounted flame throwers such as crocodile
Flamethrowers don't have the range and precision guided munitions took their niche of bunker-fucking
Canister is barely in use but remains an excellent way to turn a tank gun into an anti-infantry weapon at ~2km
Flamethrowers still have a use in areas of dense vegetation.
Thermobarics are better in every way
By whom and where? Cite examples besides your ass.
Canister actually shreds through dense vegetation better than HE. Canister is heavier shot than a machinegun and at a higher velocity.
Canister might see a return in the days of cheap plentiful drone usage. Must be cheaper than programmable munitions that the MIC is peddling rn.
Have you learned nothing this past 14 months? PRECISION PRECISION PRECISION
To start uncontrolled fires that can toast your ass as easily as the enemy's with? yeah nah
everything else a bunker-buster does better
Ive learned that precision precision precision doesnt last forever unless uncle sugar is footing the bill.
Uncle SAM has transferred military equipment and ammo of all types amounting to less than 50 billion dollars as at Jan 2023, which is about one year of Russia's defence budget. The effect was to completely turn the tide, wreck Russia's invasion plans built up for the past 7 years, and demolish decades of Cold War stockpiles.
The efficiency is undeniable.
Precision = efficiency. Efficiency is king. Some things don’t have to be ultra precise but even among things than can be imprecise, the ones closer to precision are better.
Imagine wasting a PGM on a hobby drone that you can shred easily with canister.
>canister
is the smaller scale equivalent of using machine guns to shoot down aircraft in 1944 instead of fuzed shells.
Yeah except a hobby drone isnt a 1940s era aircraft and cannister isnt a 1940s era machinegun.
Youve got a tank capable of shooting down low flying aircraft with its fire control system, but youd rather waste a missile orders of magnitude more expensive than a canister shell.
>a hobby drone isnt a 1940s era aircraft and cannister isnt a 1940s era machinegun
It is, on a smaller scale
>waste a missile
nope
Precision programmable autocannon shells are what everyone's racing for now, for good reason.
Because they have expensive munitions to sell.
Same way they do now, anything they cant detect themselves gets detected by another element and the information is relayed to them any number of ways.
There are several solutions for limited vertical travel of the primary armament, new armaments that can traverse that high or a secondary canon/ifv canon that can. Programable munitions are a complete waste on small drones when a burst of canister or flechette would do as well for less cost.
>grorious nippon warrior no need expensive "radar fuzed" frak artirrery, is burrshit sord by cowardry american miritary industriar comprex
>June 19, 1944
Explain to me and the other anons: how exactly are you going to hit a drone, flying at 2+ km altitude, with a buckshot cloud that can only reach about 1.2 km altitude (remember that range =/= altitude; range is horizontal, altitude is vertical) at best.
That's the whole point of flak shells like AHEAD (and similar): they're aerodynamic enough to reach 2.5+ km altitude before bursting into the buckshot cloud, and they do it in a controlled pattern.
Gyrojet Canister Rounds
Gyrojet is an overcomplicated meme when 30/35 mm AHEAD exists.
>Precision programmable autocannon shells
Maybe poor countries, but the US has laser SHORAD systems that mount to a Stryker that are far enough along that they're being put into the hands of the local chromosome hoarders to test and break. A dollar of gas/diesel per dead drone is far more cost effective then expensive shells.
The US is going for 3P as well, because when you've ten times the budget of everyone else, whynotboth.jpg
>The US basically plays Hoi4 with 25 research slots
Fair enough, though I would argue that they're pretty clearly an intermediate stopgap while DEWs are what the US actually wants to field for their ADN against meme drones. The autocannon rounds are probably intended to be dual purpose since there's that absolutely based video of the Bradley, I think?, sweeping a trench with airburst autocannon rounds, but if you've already got that capability to deal with ground troops, might as well give the gun the elevation and sensors to shoot up as well.
>sweeping a trench with airburst autocannon rounds
The first one that I recall is a Bundeswehr Puma
but I think American videos have come up too
You can also put one through a window and completely fuck up the insides. That's murder.
How does a tank detect a quad coptor from far enough away it will still be engageable with the tanks relatively modest maximum elevation and turret transverse? Hobby drones have a tiny signature.
Incendiaries do everything flamethrowers do but better. Grape shot actually gives a bigger AoE than HE.
Honestly?
Media coverage. Burning someone to death looks pretty horrific and costs you major PR points back home.
(Dying of being melted alive isn't much different to dying of being shot in the head but i don't make the rules)
Nah, military has no problem burning people alive, see
Wrong. Very wrong.
A thermobaric warhead mostly does the same job as a flamethrower did in combat (burn and suffocate the enemy from defensive fortifications) far more efficiently. Any defoliating action can be done with napalm or agent orange from the air. Infantry troops would pretty much only use flamethrowers for clearing brush nowadays, which again can be done easily by other means.
Flame throwers have a very short range and I rather the guy I'm trying to kill die now instead of later. What scenario would a flamethrower be better then a bomb/grenade/bullet? Even against a tunnel system or bunker, I feel like a decent size grenade or bomb will do the trick over something like flamethrower.
visually intimidating weapon scares the liberal.
?t=137
Flamethrower's, in the traditional sense, are largely relegated to the dustbin for the reason of better and more effective things exist. Rockets or Missiles with incendiary payload carry the same capacity for destruction with putting the operators at far less potential risk.
Flamethrower tanks, such as the M67 "Zippo", required the sacrifice of the main gun, thus reducing the overall flexability in terms of targets it can effectively engage.
Canister is still viable since it's simply a type of ammunition and doesn't need a rework of a vehicles internals. If you don't need it, you take it out. It being an option doesn't take away from the overall effectiveness of a platform, which a cumbersome flamethrower system does.
Flamethrowers are perfect for urban warfare.
Neither is.