Quotulatiousness

August 8, 2012

Sometimes simulation isn’t close enough to reality

Filed under: History, Military, Technology, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:06

The military depends on accurate simulations to train troops, to develop new weapons, and to find ways to counteract military developments in potential enemy forces. It’s obvious that the quality of your simulation is very important, but sometimes the assumptions made in those simulations are quite at odds with the reality they’re supposed to be mimicking:

Increasingly, over the last half century, there has been a culture clash among weapons developers over how to test the new stuff. The problem revolves around the question of what is the most realistic reality. Put another way, how do you go about providing really accurate testing of what the new weapon will do when encountering a real opponent.

The problem is an ancient one, but let us keep the examples less than a century old. At the start of World War I in 1914 there were two types of artillery shells. One was high explosive. The other, more expensive to build and theoretically more effective, was shrapnel. This type was like a shotgun shell. It exploded in the air and sprayed the ground below with metal balls. Tests had shown that these balls would penetrate wood boards set up to represent troops. Because of the expense, less than half the shells used were shrapnel. The need for more artillery shells and the high cost of shrapnel shell led to it being largely replaced by the less effective high-explosive.

Later came a startling revelation. In the 1930s a group of American technicians were setting up some shrapnel shells for a test and one shell exploded prematurely, peppering some of the people with the “lethal” metal balls. They all survived. Further investigation revealed that human skin, muscle and bone were far more resistant to the metal balls than wood boards. World War I combat surgeons, when questioned, remembered that they had never seen a penetration wound caused by shrapnel balls. There has never been much official note made of this very humane weapon during, or after war.

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