askchapo

Modern weaponry? FASCAM (Family of Scatterable Mines). Effectively a "minefield in a can" where each mine is launched from a tube that has a little computer brain in it that is supposed to have a timer that tells it to detonate after so many hours.

Good idea right? Forces can quickly drop some area denial minefields over square miles in a matter of hours instead of the days it took with with hand emplacing that will explode themselves instead of needing to be removed by hand. But with all the points of failure in computery devices... internal battery failure, failure to communicate between the brain box and the mines before deployment, the mine canisters getting really hot making the solder on the mines' circuit boards getting soft enough that things break loose when hitting the ground nothing about these things seems to be a "good idea."

Wind up having to manually proof minefields anyways AND you've got WAY less idea where the fucking things landed than with hand emplacements.

Oh... and the antipersonnel mines that are mixed in with the antivehicle/tank mines try to throw out trip wires when they are dropped. Making an already fucking terrible weapon that causes terrible situations even more terrible.