Anti-vehicle mines are very useful route denial weapons, but extremely difficult to place in urban settings. They normally have to be either buried in the road surface, or placed via an existing culvert or drain. This greatly limits the options.
But do not despair* ! The BorgCo weapons engineering team have the answer.
The ingenious solution is to adapt the numerous service and utility access points embedded in roadways. Now, spoilsports that they are, many authorities have taken to tack-welding these closed, precluding their easy and discreet removal. So, to overcome this, BorgCo have developed a thin, explosive-packed appliqué cover which fits over the existing fitment and delivers a devastating blast to a vehicle passing over it. While the device only contains a couple of kilos of secondary composition, it is more than enough to destroy a typical soft-skinned vehicle, and the rear of the hardened steel upper plate is deeply etched in a checkerboard pattern to guarantee efficient fragmentation into kinetic penetrators capable of easily shredding the occupants of a car.
To aid concealment, the kit comes complete with a portable wide-format printer. Simply snap a photo, and then print out a covering that exactly resembles the existing fitment. There’s no need even to approach the chosen site, as utility companies are unimaginative and tend to fit numerous examples of the same type of manhole cover throughout their delivery area, so having identified the type of cover required, simply find one elsewhere that can be photographed without attracting attention. Then peel the self-adhesive backing from the sheet and stick it onto the mine’s upper surface. Shims can be placed below the sheet to produce genuine 3D texturing, so that from a low angle it’s indistinguishable from the real thing.
To deploy, peel of the backing from the device itself and place it over the chosen location. For extra stealth, this can be done during the hours of darkness, from a small van that has a suitably-sized hatch cut in the load space; the van stops momentarily over the target, guided by concealed CCTV cameras, and the team in the back then just press the unit down onto the existing manhole cover.
Initiation can be by a selection of systems; command wire, simple pressure/impact, secure radio, cellular phone, or best of all radio paging technology which gives wide area coverage using a commercial system, but has no telltale back-channel like a cellular phone – it’s essentially a passive receiver.
Now it’s easy to ensure that, for those who you may disagree with, their day may end very differently – and much sooner – than their expectations.
*Our legal department have insisted that we point out that there are in fact many, many excellent reasons for despair, but the lack of an efficient urban anti-vehicle mine is not now one of them.-- 8th of 7, Jul 06 2019 Just out of interest, how thin could a shape-charge/EFP be made, to still have most of the blast in the "thin" direction (ie: perpendicular to the "large" dimensions)? Err, asking for a friend...-- neutrinos_shadow, Jul 07 2019 Thin layers of explosive deliver most of their force perpendicular to the layer. This directionality gets bigger as the layers get thinner relative to their larger dimension.
As an example, if Wales (surface area 8000 square miles; thickness about 28 miles) could be made to explode, it would be brilliant.-- MaxwellBuchanan, Jul 07 2019 And to think I've been beating my head against the wall trying to develop an enormous hole applique, a la Wile E. Coyote.-- RayfordSteele, Jul 09 2019 // van that has a suitably-sized hatch cut in the load space //
Wouldn't the driveshaft, differential, and axle get in the way? Is there a van available that has the driveshaft and differential offset to one side of the vehicle?-- notexactly, Jul 21 2019 [notexactly] there are front-wheel-drive vans, with a nice, large, low floor in the back. Perfect!-- neutrinos_shadow, Jul 21 2019 random, halfbakery