Weapon name questions
 

I have two questions about weapon names that appear in a number of OOBs.

1: What is the number in "Napalm 250" and "Napalm 500"? I had originally thought it was overall weight of the canister, but that doesn't appear to be it. Is it weight (lbs or kilos?) or volume (gallons or liters?) of the mixture in the canister?

2: Is there any specific weapon that "HE Cluster Bomb" was based off of? I'm trying create gradients in some OOBs of larger and smaller cluster weapons, and I would like to use this weapon as a point of reference.

Thanks in advance.

Re: Weapon name questions
 

1) Who knows? - it appeared some time back when the OOBS were in the hands of the OOB design team. Originally there was only "napalm". Assume one is smaller than the other.

2) HE cluster bomb is simply that. There is no specific weapon. Assume some larger ones would justify 2 or more of these, and some smaller ones (perhaps) may be rolled into one unit of HE cluster bomb. Ditto AP cluster bomb, or whatever the OOB designers decided to rename the things to be (e.g. belouga or Bl-755 or whatever).

Cheers
Andy

Re: Weapon name questions
 

Well thanks at least for that. I guess I can just fool around with it until it seems correctly proportional.

Re: Weapon name questions
 

As far as the napalm goes, I think it's liters, or a close approximation thereof. 250 liters is about 63 gallons, and early napalm tanks were modified fighter plane drop tanks which held 75 gallons. Later, jet fighters like the F-4 carried much larger napalm tanks, 150 gallons or so. By weight, I believe 75 gallon tanks were around 500 pounds full (250 liters of water would be 250kg or 550lbs) and 150 gallon tanks would be double that. Since napalm is semi-solid, it should be lighter than pure liquid, and dedicated napalm canisters were relatively thin-walled as a result

Basileus

Re: Weapon name questions
 

What I was going with was that the Napalm 500 was close to the BLU-1/B which is a "750 lb" canister with between 90-100 gallons of naplam. The Napalm 250 was, as you said, the 500 lb canisters with between 60-70 gallons rough appoximation. I then created the AN/M47A3, by tweaking numbers out of numbers from a 250 lb bomb (seeing as the M47's case is thicker than later canisters) and also working from the napalm numbers.