An vital a part of manhood has all the time been about having the competence to be efficient on this planet — having the breadth of abilities, the savoir-faire, to deal with any state of affairs you end up in. With that in thoughts, every Sunday we’ll be republishing one of many illustrated guides from our archives, so you’ll be able to hone your manly know-how week by week.
Grenades are diabolical little units that return so far as the eighth century when troopers from the Byzantine Empire started placing incendiary compounds in small stone or ceramic jars and hurling them at their enemies. In the present day’s grenades aren’t an entire lot extra elegant.
There are a number of sorts of grenades, with time-delayed fragmentation grenades being the commonest in fashionable armies. Frag grenades are manufactured from metal or some super-hard artificial and crammed with explosive materials. If you pull the detonation pin and launch the deal with, the fuse is triggered to ignite the cost.
Regardless of their explosive energy, it isn’t the explosion itself that’s dangerous. It’s the shrapnel. When a grenade blows up, the metal physique disintegrates into a mess of tiny items. These fragments hurtle by way of the air in all instructions, like a shotgun blast. The bumpy texture on the surface of many grenades (therefore their “pineapple” nickname) helps them erupt into more practical shrapnel. If a type of items catches you fallacious, it may be lethal.
Most grenades will detonate about 3-5 seconds after the set off is launched, providing you with a number of crucial moments to react. The kill radius from a grenade’s explosion is about 15 ft, and the casualty radius is about 50 ft, although items of shrapnel can nonetheless fly a lot farther than that. You’re unlikely going to have the ability to utterly outrun the explosion (and don’t strive choosing up the grenade and throwing it again!), and since the blast might be cone-shaped in trajectory, with extra shrapnel flying upwards and fewer alongside the bottom, you don’t wish to be caught in an upright place when it hits. So the second a grenade lands in your neighborhood, you wish to dash ahead a number of steps after which instantly hit the deck.
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