Anti-personnel land mines are notoriously useless, they have at best barely slowed an attacking force, although they do produce gruesome injuries. The purpose of any localized defense is to slow an attacking force long enough for mortars and artillery to be aimed and additional forces to be deployed. In U.S. doctrine, mine fields are only used with an overwatch, personnel deployed immediately behind them. Russians and Chinese bury and abandon mines to impede and discourage movement.
In World War I, the British developed what they called the Livens projector. It was a pipe section with a steel plate welded across one end. In side of this pipe were placed a propellant charge and a metal canister containing poison gas. A shallow hole would be dug, the projector placed in it at a desirable angle and the apparatus would be used as a short range mortar to throw the canister and gas to the opponents trench lines.
A more modern version of this could be built with cluster munitions, A. It would be better for the cluster bombs to be deployed as D rather than C, having more of a horizontal to left and right rather than elongated in depth, the attacking force would be deployed effectively horizontally and the munitions would want a similar spread to cover them. Infantry tend to be useless when firing rifles at more than one hundred meters, so covering relatively short range fire over a horizontal distance left and right is more important than firing at greater range, at least for stopping an immediate attack.
In order to achieve this spread the casing would have an oval shape,similar to D, and a cone would be placed over the propellant, inside the bombs as at A. That should cause a wider spread when fired. The maximum range desired would be no more than 200 meters. There is a ballistic formula neglecting air drag; distance, s = velocity squared / gravity when fired at the angle of 45, which achieves maximal range. For 200 m, g = 10 m/s2, v = 45 m/s, a very low velocity and the projector walls can be fairly thin.
For the bomblets, assume an explosive content of 200 grams and a steel jacket of 100 grams. Thee is a normalized distance, a product of dimensional analysis for explosives. It is the energy of the explosive divided by atmospheric pressure and then the third root of the quotient being taken. For 200 gram of explosive, assuming an explosive value of about 4.8 Mega joules per kilogram, the normalized distance would be a little over 2 meters. At sea level, at one half standard distance there are 100% fatalities; at 3/4 standard distance lungs collapse. The bomblets would explode on the ground, so the explosive force would be peak at ankle height, the distance is measured form the actual point of the explosion. With the metal fragments and the explosion, it might be disruptive out to about meters radius or about 50 square meters.
The question then becomes centered on how heavy to make the loaded projector. If 300 bomblets of 300grams each were loaded, they would mass 90 kilograms, all up it would mass 120-150 kg. It could ber made smaller, but it would still be movable by a small group of personnel. 300 bomblets at 50 m2 each would cover 15 000 m2, or an ellipse of 100 meters by 200 meters.
The projectors would be placed just in front of the defensive position, that way short falls would not land on the defenders. They would be dug into the ground with an angle appropriate for the desired range, B. They could be made in 2 varieties; one with the bomblets detonating immediately upon contact with the ground, and another with delay fuses that would explode in sequence like popcorn. The first would be fired to stop the progress of the attack and then the second would be fired to inhibit reorganization of the attack.
If the projectors are not used, their safety switches can be reset and they can be carried off to be reused. I do not believe that any minefield ever inflicted more than 5% casualties on an attacking force, the projectors would be more effective at stopping, or at least delaying and inhibiting an attack.
This system would eliminate the problems of the inevitable casualties associated with laying one's own minefield. It does use cluster bomblets which many countries are moving away from.
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