The M2 flame thrower

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Aesop
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Re: The M2 flame thrower

Post by Aesop »

D5CAV wrote:Back in my day, if you couldn't throw a grenade to the range of a flamethrower, you didn't pass basic. The blast radius of a grenade is almost the range of a flamethrower. It is considered very bad manners to throw a grenade inside its blast radius. However, I understand that they are having problems with this now that women are in combat arms.

I wouldn't want a 5 gal can of gasoline strapped to someone's back in my squad. A 5 gallon can of gasoline pressurized to 400psi? NFW

But, hey, if you want to volunteer ...
Please pay closer attention to the training materials. :D
In order:
1) The flamethrower projects flame, which burns over there, not back at you, and keeps burning if it hits anything or anyone flammable.
While a grenade might miss a firing slit (and then bounce back towards you), missing with a few ounces of gasoline isn't a problem, because you can move the stream around until you hit the sweet spot, and the screaming inside the bunker confirms proper weapons placement. Let's see some Smartypants do that with a grenade.
2) The gasoline is always at 14.7psi. The nitrogen propellant tank is the pressurized one. That's the one that does the work.
If somebody throws a WP grenade on your ass, it's a problem, but at that point, whether or not you were carrying four gallons of gasoline is largely moot. The only real drawbacks are signature, weight, and limited capacity before it's empty. The plusses are that anything within range you can see is going to die a horrible flaming death.
3)A grenade goes "whump" once, and showers a few bits of shrapnel. A flamethrower shoots flaming death into bunker slits from 40 yards away, and keeps burning the ass of whomever you splooged, long after the accelerant dies out. And they helpfully scream like little girls the entire time, and flail about, giving you additional morale kills on your intended enemies, and occasionally the 'splodey things on their body like ammo and grenades provide additional secondary explosions and casualties as they cook off! Yay, ingenuity!
4) It was a de facto antitank weapon in urban combat, because you could take out multiple AFVs with the backpack equivalent of a Molotov Cocktail Launcher. I would love to see what one would do to an M1 Abrams or M2/M3 Bradley, let alone an MRAP, just for research purposes. I think it would open some eyes and shut a few mouths.
5) It's exactly the weapon we should use for firing squads for terrorists captured in wars like Iraq and A-stan.

Nota bene that cultural mores are such that despite issuing thousands of them, no one from WWII or Korea ever says "I was a flamethrower operator." NO ONE. As Col. Kurtz observed, we teach young men to drop fire on their enemies, but we won't let them write "Fuck" on their airplanes. No one wants their relatives and friends to know that their job was to fry enemy soldiers and watch them dance around on fire. It upsets people at their breakfast.

The jackassical M202A1 was an abortion of a weapon to replace the M2, another legacy of the NacNamara DoD Idiot Trust of dumb ideas. The rockets leaked, thus insuring that if you every fired it, 70/30 you would go up in the same blast, every time, if the pyrophyric agent didn't spontaneously combust the operator and anyone nearby before use upon contact with air. The best use of that system would have been to deliver them, intact, to the enemy, in hopes they would be deployed.

It's criminal that a bunch of non-combat jackasses and multi-star pussies have relegated hella-effective weapons like Claymores, Bouncing Betties, Toe Poppers, and M2 flamethrowers to the scrap heap, but that combat troops have to wear reflective belts to go jogging. I'm surprised they haven't added a module to the M-4 that lets anyone forward of the muzzle know that a loud device is about to employed, and to please cover their ears, just before firing ignition, and make BUD/S trainees wear arm floaties before pool training. If anyone is still active, do they still do (sanitized for your protection) jody calls when running, or do TPTB just hold a formation group hug afterwards, and award participation trophies? Buncha fucking pussies...
"There are four types of homicide: felonious, accidental, justifiable, and praiseworthy." -Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
MarkD
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Re: The M2 flame thrower

Post by MarkD »

Aesop wrote:(snip)
2) The gasoline is always at 14.7psi. The nitrogen propellant tank is the pressurized one. (snip).
Sorry Aesop, but at least according to the video the fuel is pressurized to 300+ psi, the pressure tank is much higher, and there's a regulator to keep the fuel flowing at that 300+ psi. There was a safety cut-off set for 400-something psi in case the regulator failed and pumped enough pressure into the fuel tanks that the may rupture.
Aesop
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Re: The M2 flame thrower

Post by Aesop »

Yes, but no.
The fuel tanks were pressurized during firing (so no, not always at 14.7psi), but only when you opened the propellant tank up (to fire), until the fuel was used up. Then you vent the pressurized nitrogen, and you're just carrying an empty metal can.
They were filled, as you'll note, by hand, through open valves.
You only pressure up just before you fire, and you only stay pressurized until you're out of fuel.
(Otherwise when you open the supply cap to refill, you'd be picking it out of your head when it came off at 380psi.)

So functionally, for a few seconds to maybe a few minutes - when you were flame-on at the enemy.
4-5 bursts, and then you were empty anyways, and then it's just three tanks full of nitrogen gas.
Not walking around with all tanks jacked up to maximum all the time.

As Ian noted in the video, the only problem was actually having nitrogen for an inert propellant. Substituting compressed air made everything flammable.
"There are four types of homicide: felonious, accidental, justifiable, and praiseworthy." -Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
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randy
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Re: The M2 flame thrower

Post by randy »

Aesop wrote:Nota bene that cultural mores are such that despite issuing thousands of them, no one from WWII or Korea ever says "I was a flamethrower operator." NO ONE. As Col. Kurtz observed, we teach young men to drop fire on their enemies, but we won't let them write "Fuck" on their airplanes. No one wants their relatives and friends to know that their job was to fry enemy soldiers and watch them dance around on fire. It upsets people at their breakfast.
Not sure of accuracy, and can't remember the source, but I read somewhere that Wehrmacht Flammenwerfer operators had their ID cards reissued to remove that specific qualification. Supposedly, if captured by the Soviets, troops with IDs carrying that qualification were given a taste of being on the receiving end.
...even before I read MHI, my response to seeing a poster for the stars of the latest Twilight movies was "I see 2 targets and a collaborator".
MarkD
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Re: The M2 flame thrower

Post by MarkD »

Aesop wrote:Yes, but no.
The fuel tanks were pressurized during firing (so no, not always at 14.7psi), but only when you opened the propellant tank up (to fire), until the fuel was used up. Then you vent the pressurized nitrogen, and you're just carrying an empty metal can.
They were filled, as you'll note, by hand, through open valves.
You only pressure up just before you fire, and you only stay pressurized until you're out of fuel.
(Otherwise when you open the supply cap to refill, you'd be picking it out of your head when it came off at 380psi.)

So functionally, for a few seconds to maybe a few minutes - when you were flame-on at the enemy.
4-5 bursts, and then you were empty anyways, and then it's just three tanks full of nitrogen gas.
Not walking around with all tanks jacked up to maximum all the time.

As Ian noted in the video, the only problem was actually having nitrogen for an inert propellant. Substituting compressed air made everything flammable.
Ah, OK, gotcha, my bad.

I KNEW there was something I was missing.

Never carried or used one. Dad spoke highly of them on Iwo Jima. And wouldn't have traded places with them, because they were third behind Corpsmen and officers to be shot at.
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D5CAV
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Re: The M2 flame thrower

Post by D5CAV »

Aesop wrote:The only real drawbacks are signature, weight, and limited capacity before it's empty. The plusses are that anything within range you can see is going to die a horrible flaming death.
Hey NPR, it looks like you're off the hook and we get to have our flamethrower, after all.

Aesop just volunteered to be on point humping the flamethrower.
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
toad
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Re: The M2 flame thrower

Post by toad »

Then there is the ever popular M34 white phosphorous grenade. Don't leave home without a canteen full of copper sulfate solution and/or a pointy knife to flick off fragments that land on you when the wind is wrong or they bounce off something in your direction.
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Cybrludite
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Re: The M2 flame thrower

Post by Cybrludite »

Aesop wrote:It's criminal that a bunch of non-combat jackasses and multi-star pussies have relegated hella-effective weapons like Claymores, Bouncing Betties, Toe Poppers, and M2 flamethrowers to the scrap heap, but that combat troops have to wear reflective belts to go jogging. I'm surprised they haven't added a module to the M-4 that lets anyone forward of the muzzle know that a loud device is about to employed, and to please cover their ears, just before firing ignition, and make BUD/S trainees wear arm floaties before pool training. If anyone is still active, do they still do (sanitized for your protection) jody calls when running, or do TPTB just hold a formation group hug afterwards, and award participation trophies? Buncha fucking pussies...
Tun Tavern, November 10, 1775, as the second man marks his X on the dotted line, the first one to have done so looks at him and says, "It ain't like it was in the Old Corps." :twisted:
"If it ain't the Devil's Music, you ain't doin' it right." - Chris Thomas King

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Aesop
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Re: The M2 flame thrower

Post by Aesop »

Cybrludite wrote:
Aesop wrote:It's criminal that a bunch of non-combat jackasses and multi-star pussies have relegated hella-effective weapons like Claymores, Bouncing Betties, Toe Poppers, and M2 flamethrowers to the scrap heap, but that combat troops have to wear reflective belts to go jogging. I'm surprised they haven't added a module to the M-4 that lets anyone forward of the muzzle know that a loud device is about to employed, and to please cover their ears, just before firing ignition, and make BUD/S trainees wear arm floaties before pool training. If anyone is still active, do they still do (sanitized for your protection) jody calls when running, or do TPTB just hold a formation group hug afterwards, and award participation trophies? Buncha fucking pussies...
Tun Tavern, November 10, 1775, as the second man marks his X on the dotted line, the first one to have done so looks at him and says, "It ain't like it was in the Old Corps." :twisted:
Sorry, but things have gone a few astronomical units beyond simple "Old Cords, New Corps" bullshit:
Image


The first place to deploy a flamethrower would be DoD and the Pentagon.
Call me when America gets a military back that's worthy of the name, and the scoundrels in charge now are twisting in the wind by their necks.
"There are four types of homicide: felonious, accidental, justifiable, and praiseworthy." -Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
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