The art of war is to flip your opponent's strengths.They are large, but slow.They are strong, yet weak where armour is chinked. Their supply lines become your supplies.Their armouries become your weapons.
The intel is good. They will attempt to breach your defences by sea at 04:30 before sunrise.You know for certain that the attack will come from the ocean since they've destroyed all bridges in or out of your few remaining strongholds.The mountainous terrain renders their infantry units ineffectual against guerilla tactics, and natural dead-zone pockets of radio interference created by metals in the surrounding cliffs have made easy targets of their air attacks.A defeat here would signal the beginning of the end of the resistance while victory will be a tipping point as winter is fast approaching and their reserves are running low.
They can only come from the beach.
In the first days of the invasion, before the looting could even begin, you and the boys had already determined which places to infiltrate and defend while leaving common grocery stores and the like to the looters.Many of the goods hauled to safer locations seemed unnecessary at the time. For instance a mis-shippment of 10 pallets of Seal-Skin shoe spray being returned rather than the 10 bottles ordered by the local Five'n'Dime may very well be our salvation.
Weeks have been spent creating the infrastructure of your trap.More than 130 dump truck loads of dry beach sand has been made to be hydrophobic.Massive sand bag dams hastily erected in the dead of night while the low tide window lasted allowed the few remaining pieces of still functional equipment to replace a vast section of the beachfront with dry hydrophobic sand but not before laying perforated tubing beneath each pit.
The enemy has waited til highest tide to reach as far inland as possible before disembarking and as the landing craft breach the surf the men and bots begin to pour forth.They meet no resistance as they begin to arm drones and unpack larger pieces of equipment.The signal is given and huge volumes of compressed air erupt from the buried airlines rendering the solid appearing beach to become as liquid as the water they emerged from.Previously floating vessels remain afloat but more than 90% of the men and equipment instantly sink more than twelve feet deep at which point the air is disengaged locking all and sundry within the still dry sand.
What remains of the invading force surrenders with minimal persuasion and will be ransomed for your own POW's.
You withdraw beyond range while their few remaining ships wastefully deplete precious ammunition and, when they finally withdraw, the air lines once again fluidize the sand as massive cargo nets raise your newly acquired weapons and supplies to the surface.
You will put them to good use.-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Feb 18 2024 Portable bridge https://youtu.be/9u...si=4mJJdZGyoKQZk9vX [21 Quest, Feb 18 2024] Bravo for the descriptive efforts, but after all of that work some sad nurk plants a bone on it. I'm cancelling out that negativity with this croissant morsel of positivity,-- xenzag, Feb 18 2024 Honestly, I was just daydreaming today about fluidizing hydrophobic sand beneath water and could find no science or experiment to see the effects for myself and this little story started writing itself in my head and I thought it was cool enough to not be the only audience as it played out.
<side note>
The reason I was daydreaming about fluidizing hydrophobic sand under water is because a section of the playground I am constructing will have a tiny Log-round "castle" containing a hacked X-box 360 real-time topographical map projection sand box, a hydrophobic wet sand box, and an overhead projection fluidized sand lava moat around the castle with floating log-round islands letting the little beggars play 'the ground is lava' for real, and I was thinking of a new way to incorporate another sand display.-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Feb 18 2024 I dunno, I mean presumably the deeper you want the bed to be a) the more sand you're going to need, and b) the higher the pressure you're going to need to fluidise it, so the more compressed air you'll need per square metre.
a) twelve feet is over 3.6 metres. If that's about the height of a dump-truck's load (googling suggests it's less), the area a truckload can cover is the same as the truck - so you've not actually covered all that much area.
b) the fluidised beds I've seen have been fairly shallow, and seemed to need quite a lot of gas to keep flowing.
Overall, I'd say it's the sort of thing which would work really well in a movie.-- Loris, Feb 18 2024 hmmmm... you're taking this too seriously Mr. Cruise.
...assume it's a small beach in an isolated cove, and we've retrofit our now depleted massive small-town gas-station propane-tanks as fast-release air-pigs and...
...and, Action!-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Feb 18 2024 Yes, I know you told me to call you Tom, but it just feels inappropriate, y'know?-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Feb 18 2024 One important feature of any beach defense is what appears to be an ordinary sand-castle, but is held together with some sort of fixative, so that the child-size flag on top mocks the invaders by its surprising persistence. When finally pulled out, it might trigger a large mine.-- pertinax, Feb 18 2024 This kind of thinking is what got the French caught with their pants down in WW2. You think to yourself, they CAN'T come from any other direction because they took out the bridges... but uh... see link. They took out YOUR bridges lol-- 21 Quest, Feb 18 2024 Oh the negativity!-- pashute, Feb 19 2024 random, halfbakery