WW2 claims three more lives

[Tornado Ninja Fan]

Next to all bombs are found by looking at old photographs made by the bombers during their bombing run and not accidentally on construction sites. Evacuation plans are announced at least a month in advance and the whole area (including the road to the place where they detonated the bomb) were closed and patrolled by the police.

(We had to evacuate two times in the last two years and they've already found the next one.)

[Oskuro]

This reminds me of an old physics exercise where we had to place an egg inside a juice carton (of the smallish kind) using whatever contrivances we wanted, and then drop it and have the egg survive.

When it comes to burying, would it help hiding the bomb under a solid casing (wood, for example), and then pouring the dirt on top gently? The idea would be for the casing to absorb the vibration of the dirt moving around the bomb.

And I know that defusing in many situations is more practical, just throwing wacky ideas around to learn a bit about this stuff.

[Sea Skimmer]

A zeppelin should have a good chance sure, but if the bomb did explode then having it suspended up in the air is the worst possible place to put it, at least until you climbed to a couple thousand feet and got its blast radius away from the ground. The practical issues of wind speed and clearance around buildings and wires would be huge limitations though and you are just adding so many kinds of new safety risks. I mean what if you dropped the fused bomb? Even if you made the zeppelin carefully fly over wide open streets the whole way out of the city, easier said then done, the need to fly with major height for safety from an accidental explosion also means if the bomb accidentally broke free and dropped it would have time to shift its course from the wind as it fell. Also I think once you have the blimb (no need for a rigid zeppelin for this really) moving under power, rather then just lifting, vibration may be a serious issue. You will have also done little to reduce risk to humans, since humans still need to hook it all up, and someone has to fly the airship.

I suspect if you had a a specialist fused bomb moving vehicle, a giant truck would make the most sense. It should be possible to build something with walls strong enough to channel the blast of a 1000-2000lb vertically (I dunno about heavier bombs, the British dropped hoards of 4,000 and 8,000lb bombs) , while staying within normal highway load and size limits. A very careful backfill of sand would help contain fragments and the while thing would be mounted on several layers of shock insulation. The route would be carefully chosen and, pot holes and manholes spotted and avoided, and then you'd evacuate people along the route in stages. Once you get outside the city, or even to a big park you could explode it with some degree of safety. But really, unless you can make a system like this work without humans, you aren't accomplishing anything vs. a far cheaper defusing operation which has a high probability of working safely already.

In the longer term a lot of work is going to into reactive metal incendiaries which can burn out explosive fills without causing detonation, even in some fairly old and unstable explosives. However that technology is not perfected, plus it requires being able to identify the fill type of a bomb, and on a fused bomb it still could cause a detonation if the fuse is heated before the fill is burned away. A lot of bombs actually have two or three fuses on different ends, or even eight or nine on big bombs so that gets troublesome.

But if you had a situation in which you could NOT move the bomb, then trying to burn out the fill is at least better then just exploding the bomb. I mean even if you fail and only burn part of the fill before the bomb explodes, this means as smaller blast.

[Pulp Hero]

To three fallen techs. We remember.

[Night_stalker]

*bows head*