Just an anecdote but back in the 80’s I worked with a Vietnam Vet. One day I saw several scars on his back. When I asked what they were he said “My ticket home from Vietnam.” He said while on patrol he stepped on a mine and immediately froze. When it didn’t explode he figured it had a delayed fuse. The rest of his platoon cleared out then he ran as fast as he could. A few seconds later (he wasn’t sure how many) he found himself face down with several holes in his back.
I believe there is usually a fairly noticeable explosion that shreds anything from your foot to your entire body, depending on the size of the mine. Pieces of your lower limbs suddenly going missing will usually stop you in place.
Nearly all mines operate in a very straightforward way - they maim you. They don’t rely on any cunning psychological tricks beyond the very obvious one of turning every footstep into a life-threatening adventure. “<click> Muahahaha! Now you are ***trapped ***and cannot move!” is not nearly as effective as “<BANG> Now your buddy is missing his leg from the knee down and screaming in pain! Feel free to take a step whenever you like!”
There certainly are the odd few ones which operate on release of pressure rather than application, but as far as I am aware that is a side-effect of the operating mechanism rather than psycho-trickery by the designer.
Individually built booby traps like the one described by Ranger Jeff are, naturally, a different kettle of fish - those depend on how the individual engineer deploys his bag of tricks. So are ‘smart’ mine control systems like the NVU-P which will detect the ground vibrations of people walking (or injured people crawling) and pop one of a 5-group of bouncing mines to explode at waist height. Meaning if you get close enough to set one off, anyone trying to help you will trigger the sensor and set off another, no matter how careful they are. Likewise if you try to drag yourself to safety - which leaves you the pleasant choice of lying there bleeding to death or trying to survive setting off the remainder of the group so someone can reach you.
Sometimes I wonder about the minds of people who can design and build something like this. It seems on another level of malice than just a simple landmine.
A lot of military stuff is scary-but-cool. Things like this are just downright horrid, which is sort of the point I guess. If you knew something like that might be lurking in the grass, would you be happy about going on foot patrol?
The one upside is that it supposedly self-destructs when the batteries run down after a year or so, so it won’t be blowing people up decades after deployment.
That fact apparently makes it A-OK with the landmine ban, so it can be deployed without any legal worries whatsoever - nice huh?:dubious:
With the plummeting cost of electronics, it’s probably only a short time before systems like this are available widely and cheaply, which is another reason not to join the PBI…
Why settle for reading about them when you can watch them on Youtube? 
Good post, does PBI = Poor Bloody Infantry or something else?
How do you feel about automated gun turrets designed to kill anyone within a 3KM range?
I think opinions on that are going to pretty much mirror how people feel about photo radar speed traps. Whether you’re speeding or infiltrating, the ‘other side’ has a right to take preventive measures. Should it matter whether the system is automated?
I’ve often wondered if it would be significantly less effective if an army simply erected signs that said “Danger bad guys, this here’s a mine field!” and didn’t even bother planting any hardware. I suppose you’d have to put a real minefield in here and there, or maybe just a few around the border, so your bluff wouldn’t be called all the time.
Yeah, one thing that gets neglected is that as often as not, minefields are very clearly marked as such. If the bad guys avoid the minefield entirely, then it has likely served its purpose of denying them the ability to cross a certain area. For that matter, going around the minefield might simply corral them into a particular area that you can concentrate your limited firepower on.