Saw too much movies where people step on mines and they don’t explode if the foot stay on. Do real mines work this way?
In: Engineering
This trope was probably started by soldiers’ experience with “bouncing” mines that use a black powder charge to launch into the air before exploding their main charge and launching shrapnel.
These sort of mines need to trigger after the enemy is no longer stepping on them to have maximum effectiveness so they have a small delay between when they’re stepped on and when they launch. This might have given the impression that they don’t explode when the foot stays on but it isn’t accurate.
However, if a soldier were very fast about slamming something heavy like his pack down on top of a bouncing type mine after it was triggered and before it detonated, its effectiveness would be significantly reduced since it might not successfully launch and its shrapnel (which is designed to explode outwards horizontally) would mostly be absorbed by the ground around it if it stayed buried.
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