So, you can't destroy a little house anymore (with GAU-8)

[Kenan]

I remember in Black Shark, by using 30mm HE ammo, you could easily destroy smaller houses. In DCS: A10C, it looks like you can't do that with any type of gun ammo. I tried straffing smaller houses but no joy.

 

So, what gives?:helpsmilie:

[Mugenjin]

Did you also try with HE or with CM? Since with CM only every fifth is an HE round that could account for something since I don't think that AP will do that much damage to a house :>

 

And how realistic is it to begin with that you can level houses with 30mm?

[Spetz]

Very realistic actually. 25mm used in Afghanistan and Iraq do a fairly good job of it.

[egorter]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5Y66p_vR2g&feature=related

[Laud]

That video is really cool! Looks aweful!

[S77th-konkussion]

Wouldn't all that dust & debris be great to see someday..

[sobek]

Very realistic actually. 25mm used in Afghanistan and Iraq do a fairly good job of it.

 

You still need a lot to really level a house. To the pilot it most likely looks like the house takes almost no damage (and that is what really matters for the sim). People in the house, different story, naturally.

[MTFDarkEagle]

Yeah... No biodermal biopalm biological faceoil bullcr*p will fix a 30mm depleted uranium round going through your face :matrix:

[Mike Busutil]

I wouldnt call that a house anyway...

[tusler]

I wouldnt call that a house anyway...

 

That is middle class housing in that part of the world like a garbage truck in parts of America is called a motorhome.:lol:

[Kenan]

I'm no expert but one small house sprayed with HE 30mm rounds should definetelly loose the roof and few construction parts.

 

At least a texture change or any kind of damage indication would be cool, but it's not that much of a big deal anyway.

[Belphe]

Yeah... No biodermal biopalm biological faceoil bullcr*p will fix a 30mm depleted uranium round going through your face :matrix:

 

 

I thought they are not using depleted uranium any more... Apparently, it was not humane...

[mooshim]

DU is pretty grim all around...for the whole family and kids too...and the neighborhood. --Anybody with lungs, really, or any DNA they want to pass on...

 

That's one paper I don't ever want to write again.:(

 

Do Google image search if you want to feel really depressed for a few days.

 

On the other hand...

 

--I don't think Afgani women are big on biodermal biopalm biological faceoil either.

 

No QVC in the Korengal valley.

[OutOnTheOP]

Oh, gods. Not the DU fallacy again. There is more radiation emitted from a banana than a 30mm DU round.

 

That's right. A banana (potasium isotopes... which also release a higher percentage of the more harmful, higher energy Beta radiation than DU, if I recall correctly).

 

DU is considered hazardous because it's a chemical hazard, not a radiation hazard. In much the same way as lead, as it so happens. Both are relatively benign in their elemental (IE, metallic) state, and not easily absorbed into the body. As an oxide (usually a dust or powder), they're absorbed by the body (and can be breathed in). However, both are very dense, and tend to pretty much stay on the ground unless it's quite windy.

 

So unless you either regularly play in destroyed tanks, or were in or very near the tank when it was destroyed (in which case heavy metal poisoning is the least of your worries), you're probably all right. The exception to this is if the attack was in close proximity to a water source (like a stream) in which case it would have more lasting and widespread effects.

 

But again, it's a simple chemical hazard that is, as far as I have researched, pretty analogous to lead in both vector and toxicity.

 

.... but then again, "they" want us to get rid of lead bullets, too.

[aaron886]

Thanks for the informed addition... rep!

[EtherealN]

As a further addition: the whole point of the Depleted Uranium is that it is depleted. This is the parts of the ore that wasn't of a sufficiently active isotope that it could be used for weapons or reactor fuel. It does however have he "advantage" of being very dense, making it nice for penetrator rounds.

 

The lethality from a radiology standpoint of a material is most of the time directly proportional to it's half-life. (Type of decay products matter, of course, as well.) The isotopes in the DU rounds have a half-life measured in billions of years - essentially you have to store it in your body for at least something like a couple hundred million years for it to be a radiation hazard - and to be honest, if you expect to get that old you probably have the tech to get rid of the DU anyhow. :P

 

This is different from many other materials like polonium or other uranium isotopes and especially the decay products made from reactions in a reactor (it's not uranium anymore then) - they have shorter half-lifes and thus need less time to "deliver" their radiation, making them a radiation hazard.

 

The big issue is in that the body has issues handling heavy metals, causing toxicity, but as OutOnTheOp mentions: this is something that DU has in common with many other things: for example lead.

[kingpinda]

I thought they are not using depleted uranium any more... Apparently, it was not humane...

 

Yeah well they got a point. If you sprayed 30 bullets from a thompson into someones body they always died of leadpoisoning didnt they? if not figuratively instantly then literally a while later.

 

I vote to make all weapon ordance biodegradable. :p and durable... and all factories should be driven by clean energy!!!

 

/me is imagining a weapons plant with a nice windmill on top.

Edited February 25, 2011 by kingpinda

[aaron886]

Sure, good idea, lets make all of our bullets out of wood, and paint our jets with rainbows while we're at it.

[kingpinda]

Sure, good idea, lets make all of our bullets out of wood, and paint our jets with rainbows while we're at it.

 

THAT'S THE SPIRIT!!! yay :cheer3nc:

[mooshim]

I'm not sure, but I think DU and its decay products are both alpha and beta emitters.

 

Anyway, I can't vouch for veracity or fallacy. I’m not a scientist.

 

From what I’ve read, DU or (or Uranium 238--what is left over from the fissionable element Uranium 235) offers a kind of a triple threat to living things--chemical toxicity, radiological toxicity and particle toxicity.

 

Aerosolized sub-particles, soluble upon ingestion, are highly mobile and can enter into the nuclei of cells of any organism freely. It probably don't taste very good either.:(

 

I hope you are right & I certainly hope it isn't harmful.

 

I would like to believe it isn’t harmful. I sincerely would.

 

Marion Fulk, a former nuke physical chemist at the Manhattan Project and the National Lab in Bethesda doesn’t seem to. She had a good deal to say on the topic of internalized DU particles affecting human DNA and RNA because of both its chemical and radiological properties.

 

Alexandra C. Miller, a Doc @ the Armed Forces Radio-biology Research Institute goes on quite a bit about DU's chemical instability causing a million times more genetic damage than what would one would expect from simple radiation. (2001)

 

--This is all just part of the fun. This DU has a half-life of 4.5 billion years--give or take.

 

However, I didn’t do the study...I’m not a toxopathologist...I can’t know for certain who is right.

 

All I know is, I’d take bananas over Depleted Uranium any day.

 

…And I'll stay up-wind of the target… just to be on the safe side.

 

What is undeniable is that the Gau sounds damned good, and that makes me happy.:thumbup:

 

With respect to you Gents,

 

Moosh

[Apples]

Wouldn't all that dust & debris be great to see someday..

 

 

Why not now? Is it to difficult to model some dust and particles?

[Mugenjin]

@mooshim

 

When did anyone ever claim in this thread that DU wasn't harmful?

And what you posted doesn't contradict anything above: i.e. DU harmful because of chemical toxicity and not radiation.

[nomdeplume]

Why not now? Is it to difficult to model some dust and particles?

Too much load on the GPU + CPU to compute & display, I think is the issue. Top-end systems might be able to cope okay, but a lot of people don't have top-end systems, and the developers have to decide whether it's a good idea to allocate resources to implementing effects only some portion of their users can take advantage of. Given the opportunity cost - spending time on that means not spending time on things that everyone could benefit from - it probably works out as a "not worth doing yet".

 

Additionally, you can't engage things you can't see as the A-10's aiming systems are almost entirely visual, and many of the things which interfere with visual acquisition also interfere with IR. So it's not just a matter of "eye candy for top-end systems" - so realistic levels of dust + smoke etc. actually have a significant effect on gameplay, so implementing them only for some users is possibly not a sound strategy.

[Apples]

There is smoke coming from 100's of buildings in the city areas. You have a lot of dust kick up from flying low to the ground. You have contrail smoke that lingers in the air forever. When i drop my bombs and shoot my guns i wanna see a BOOM-SPLAT-POW, not a firecracker.

 

I watched a video on the tube of a CAS mission were there was a group of US soldiers pined down by a large enemy force and moving in on them. They had no smoke, flares or anything to mark themselves, just a radio. Flight lead from an F-16 group caught a glimpse of were the enemy force was, and dropped a cluster bomb. With the Dust from that explosion the rest of his flight new were to look, and the soldiers on the ground could tell them were they needed to go from there.

[leafer]

When i drop my bombs and shoot my guns i wanna see a BOOM-SPLAT-POW, not a firecracker.

 

 

And I would like to see WMD in iraq but it ain't gonna happen.