This is all good info, but I have yet to see a single piece of evidence that even a single air burst round has been fired by either side. That doesn't mean it hasn't happened it just means it hasn't been played much and there has been several articles posted stating that air burst fuses have extremely short shelf lives and may not have been available in large quantities.PJYoung said:The lethal effects of artillery were not put on a really scientific basis until WW2.
— Trent Telenko (@TrentTelenko) May 16, 2022
There were lots of reasons for this involving money & politics I won't go into.
When the operational analysts to their first bite. They made charts like this mapping fragment impacts.
2/ pic.twitter.com/ugQ6jf0oYPWhat analysts were trying to achieve was a consistent modeling of airburst frag-patterns to kill infantry in trenches.
— Trent Telenko (@TrentTelenko) May 16, 2022
Then this information was fed into engineering shell designs to get the metallurgy & design of shells
4/ pic.twitter.com/Rd7d4KgND8The movement to ban cluster weapons lead to a push to replace lots of little bombs with more efficient fragmentation with 40 years better computer technology, explosives & metallurgy.
— Trent Telenko (@TrentTelenko) May 16, 2022
This Rheinmetall infographic shows what that means in terms of shell lethality.
6/ pic.twitter.com/x12DaowN02Russian 152mm shells have not ridden the increased lethality technological development train because Russia kept artillery cluster munitions.
— Trent Telenko (@TrentTelenko) May 16, 2022
The M795 155mm shell has. And it much more lethal on a shell for shell basis than a Russian 152mm shell because it did.
8/There is a price to be paid for US M795 shell being both more lethal in its fragmentation and safer to use because of the explosives.
— Trent Telenko (@TrentTelenko) May 16, 2022
It costs more than a Russian 152mm shell.
There are reasons why the defense budget costs more for fewer weapons.
This is one of them.
9/End
Air burst certainly hell on infantry and a few would be effective over trenches but they have been plenty successful with the contact fuzes.