I still think it’s a drop tank. And I think the “jumbo-sized” one is an illusion.
These things in the photos are almost certainly drop tanks. Go to this site and pick your bomb. They all have fins of one sort or another (at least every one I looked at). The big thing in the pictures here clearly doesn’t or didn’t have fins attached to it.
I was going to say the big thing could be a drop tank from a B-52. This picture (and this ) show that the tanks are certainly big enough but they do taper at both ends (as opposed to the blunt end in the CNN picture). Still, maybe a piece broke off upon imapct and we are only seeing 2/3 of the whole thing.
Please note that modern aerial bombs come in three parts: Fuse, fin assembly, and body. Go here and observe “shipping configuration” and “tail assembly” to get an idea of the range of possibilities.
I’m still of the opinion that the object in the picture is a drop tank, but I’m less sure than before. It could be the body of a large General Purpose, Low-Drag bomb.
B-52 drop tanks are quite robust. Here, you can plan a trip up the Mekong in a boat made from B-52 drop tanks dropped during VietNam. Go here (Warning: Big!) for a better look. Note that tail-end is truncated, and appears to be part of the original design (although I would not rule out clever & skilled re-work).
Guys, back the train up a few miles here.
I don’t know for sure if its a bomb or a drop tank, but I will say that it looks nothing like the 500, 1000 and 2000 lb. GBU’s that I’ve seen, or studied (AAE major here) nor the JDAM. AFAIK we haven’t begun using “dumb” bombs yet and the lack of guidance package hints it is probably just a drop tank.
To the real point of my post. This is not huge, nor does the picture indicate that it is, nor is the photo doctored. Look closely at this photo. The top-most man, in white, facing the camera for the most part. He is holding a camera, and is photographing the object. He is taking this photo. Look closely at the slope of the hill and what would be the horizon in the photograph with respect to the angle of the photographer. The crater protrudes slightly at the lower half of the crater (as viewed in photo 1). The lip of that crater obscures the face of the hill in photo 2. The “small” man in photo 2 is actually a long distance away from the object. You can’t see his feet due to the lip of the crater, and the perspective of the photographer shown creates a optical illusion that the man in photo 2 is standing right next to it.
Okay, but what if you’re an Islamic fundamentalist who thinks you’ll just go to Paradise if you fail in your holy mission to salvage unexploded American ordnance?
Okay, but again, this is presupposing that the Taliban is gonna do what’s “normally” done, and so far I haven’t noticed them doing much of anything that I’d consider “normal”. What if they don’t care how many volunteers get blown up? If they can find enough people willing to chance it, is the stuff salvageable, or does it always automatically detonate as soon as you wiggle it?
In other words, if you’re crazy enough to try it, is it “do-able”?
I’m not really worried about the Taliban arming themselves at our expense, just curious.
For the photo analysts, bigger versions from Yahoo:
So you don’t have to use those wee versions from CNN.
Upon looking at the larger photo, I can see what Omniscient is talking about. Further, take a look at the shadow at the back of the object, and compare it to the man’s shadow. If the object were as huge as it appears to be, its shadow should be at least as long as the man’s in the background. But it isn’t.
After looking around, it looks rather like a center-line drop tank used on F-15Es (see here for an example). However, it also looks like it was broken in half (or something) – look at the lip around the back (dull) end in SmackFu’s “Big Thing” picture.
On the other hand, after looking through the site provided by Tranquilis, the object does appear to sport the two suspension lugs as well as the handling lug and electrical fuzing wells shown on the outline drawings for the various MK-8x bombs. We don’t see the tip of it, so I can’t really tell if it tapers to a point or has a fuze at the front. If it used a retarded fin configuration (again, per Tranquilis’ site), it looks like the fins could have broken off and what we see is, in fact, the front end of a MK-8x bomb (from the size, probably a MK-82 or -83).
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I agree. The two photos seem to be of the same object taken from opposite sides.
Apparently a good way of telling if a picture has been ‘photoshopped’ is to invert the colours… I havn’t actually tried this before (but saw an example of it on the WTC ‘incoming plane’ photo)…
Johnny LA has it right. The suspension lugs are the giveaway.
If you look at the shadows, rocks, etc, you’ll see the pictures of the object weretaken at about the same time of dat of the same object in the same place. The “smaller” picture is the “real” pitcure. I don’t know how the “big” picture could have been done to make the bomb appear larger.
This is most assuredly not an FAE. The shape is all wrong, and if we accept the “small” picture/object as being the real deal, it’s also to small to be an FAE.
We can’t see the tip og the thing to be 10,000% sure it is a bomb --the nose fuze would tell us for sure— so there is a tiny possibility that it is an Aero 1 300 gallon drop tank. For that to be the case, we’d have to show the “small” object/picture is also not accurately depicting the true scale of the object. A 300 galon tank is pretty big —about 20 feet long.
Well, I agree that the original picture is an optical illusion now. and thanks to the pictures provided, it does seem like 2/3 of a drop-tank (which before I posed this question, I didn’t even know existed). On an added note, i saw video of what I believe was this scene on cnn a couple hours ago. It was taken from the perspective of a good distance behind the “lone guy”, and showed the crowd gathered around the object in the distance.
If these were indeed the same characters in the still pictures, the lone guy who appeared to be standing right next to the object was in fact quite far away.
I think DF might have it. This page (nearly that same as Tranquilis’ site but with a few more pictures) has some excellent photos of MK-8x bombs that give you a good idea of what they look like. The early pictures seem wrong but the later pictures seem to nail it…especially with the back end knocked off. In addition, if we assume the ‘small’ picture gives the right scale then you can see pictures of men handling these bombs that indicate we are close in scale. The mount lugs are about right too.
If this is so then those guys standing around the thing aren’t the brightest in the world. I certainly wouldn’t get within 200 yards of the thing!
To me it appears to be a bomb. The dimensions are about right and so is the shape, especially at the back end. If you look close, you can see a slight bevel and some small “holes”. That is where the fin assembly fits onto bombs, the small holes being for the screws on the fin assembly. Looking at the markings on the front of it and the bent suspension lug, it hit the ground with quite a bit of force. If it were a drop tank, it would be in pretty poor shape. Drop tanks are not designed to take much in the way of external loads and I’ve seen noses of them get crushed by not much more than a tow tractor. As far as the color, I recovered a lot of bombs, live and practice, when I was at China Lake. That’s about what they look like and ground conditions are a lot alike between the two places. Between the general abrasion of the ground and the heat that is generated, there is rarely any paint left on them. Conclusion for me: Bomb.
Ackk…I’m brain dead. That’s what I get for talking on the phone and writing this at the same time. Tranquilis’ link and the link I provided just above are the same link.
Sorry if there was any confusion…
OTOH, I remember reading about one case in Vietnam in which an A-4 Skyhawk with landing gear trouble landed on its two drop tanks, resulting in no damage to the aircraft.
I watched an F/A-18 do the same thing once. The aircraft had very little damage. The tanks however, were a different story. I just don’t believe that a drop tank of fairly thin construction could be in that good a condition after hitting with the force that the bent suspension lug and nose markings would suggest. I’ve seen a lot of bombs and a lot of fuel tanks and I’ve never seen a drop tank with that shape. Not to say that it could be, but I have to go with bomb. Maybe not ours, but probably a bomb.
I don’t know why, but this has me LOL. The picture of teeny-tiny Afghans dancing around on a “whatever-it-is” is hilarious. 
It reminds me of the little people with the glowing eyes who saved R2D2 and C3PO when they landed on Tatooine in Star Wars I.
I think that the preferred term is “guidance challenged bomb”, in our overly PC world.
The complete lack of any fins makes me agree with the supporters of the drop tank theory.
OK, I’m convinced. It’s UXO (Unexploded Ordnance). A dud bomb.
DDG, yes, if you’re sufficently nuts, you certainly could go about picking-up UXO (duds). There’s one story circulating about an EOD type finding a house (in Bosnia?) with fourteen dud cluster bomblets lined up in a window sill. Someone in the house had been collecting them. ::shuddder::
Now, a silly question: Seeing as a number of you have first-hand experience with droptanks, and find them to be flimsy, how the heck did the guys on the river (links posted above) get B-52 droptanks in such good shape?
Those of you convinced that its a UXO, care to hypothesize on where the guidance package and the fuse mechanism are? There’s no trace of them, nor is there any trace of paint or inventory markings. I’m willing to accept that there would be signifigant loss of pain in the impact and drop, as well as damaged nose and fin assemblies, but there isn’t a single scrap of metal visible in the crater.
I’m not sold.