Is there any way to use a city as a weapon?
A lot of energy goes into the production and maintenance of a city. Concrete and steel are lifted into the sky, creating a lot of potential energy. A lot of electricity powers a city. There may be large mechanical devices in a city to move bridges, push air, lift things, etc.
Is there any practical way to use any of this in a targetable way?
I like this idea. Roads could be made to collapse when enemy vehicles use them; bridges and cantilevered buildings could be pre-stressed to propel masonry towards enemy troops or equipment. Dams could flood streets and so on. This would make invading such a booby-trapped city problematic.
The downside is that you’d end up with a pile of rubble instead of a city, and probably still get invaded anyway.
Well, there were those parabolic glass buildings that melted cars using sunlight…
The problem with that is that enemy vehicles won’t do you the favour of staying in the focus of that curved mirror for an extended period.
Sure, and the sun isn’t always shining
Which is why the 3rd century BC-style death rays are nothing but a myth.
Mediaeval castles were sort of city-as-weapon concepts - murder holes and the like. It worked better when you could rely on invaders to get close enough that you could use gravity against them.
Interesting question. This sounds like like a Maginot line writ large. I remember seeing a show which mentioned that the Swiss had pillboxes along entry routes - disguised as things like barns. And there were flak towers on the top of buildings in Germany.
Use underground tunnels between buildings to move your troops securely - and pop up in unexpected places. Or for “shoot & scoot” operations.
Rivers and trenches (like the Los Angeles floodwater system) with drawbridges to deny crossings at the defender’s choice.
The subway/metro/underground has been or can be used as a bomb shelter anywhere that the lines are tunneled deep.
I would think an obvious and less destructive action would be to create tank traps ahead of time - blow a particular point and there’s an impassable hole in the ground. Ensure that buildings do not have ground floors sufficient to keep tanks from falling into the basement (multiple levels?) For non-tank convoys, have multiple points where small towers or posts (3-foot square, 50 feet tall, for example) will fall across and block a road. Significantly reinforced sniper points in buildings. etc. Include disguised painted range markings on roads.
Conversely, I wonder if there are simple design changes to be made to bridges and other architecture to make them less susceptible to bomb damage (much like the simple design of putting V-shaped bottoms on vehicles to lessen the effect of IED’s.)
One item in the news in Ukraine was simply removing road signs to confuse the invaders. While the route of an interstate-level highway is obvious, back roads can be very confusing. Include jamming GPS-type signals, and it’s chaos. Removing urban street signs, same. Make it a rule that businesses not have names on signs that identify the street or area.
Also have an easy way to turn off lights like street lights - as well as, IIRC Britain in WWII created entire fake cities in the countryside to misdirect bombers at night, by stringing lights. String wires from tower to tower in the city. I would also suggest having installations of weather balloons with wire tethers read to launch, to snag low-flying helicopters. (I read an accident report once where a helicopter flew through an ordinary kite string. It wrapped around the control arms of the rotor enough times to bend them and make an emergency landing the only safe action.)
I had just watched some Random Fact video on Youtube and was informed a great deal of Switzerland’s infrastructure is indeed wired to blow lest some invading force start stomping through the country.
Many bridges built in West Germany during the Cold War were constructed with ready-made holes to hold charges of explosives. If the Soviets had started an invasion, teams of pioneers would have swarmed out to blow them up within hours, to slow down the advancing forces. This was obviously never used, but lots of bridges that are around still have those holes.
How hard is it to extract an I-beam it of a building? I feel like they would be a fairly effective weapon, dumped over the top of a building?
Well… we might have something of an example in the design of modern Paris. There’s some debate over whether Baron Hausmann’s renovation of Paris in the mid-late 19th century was done with an eye toward having large, difficult-to-barricade avenues, as well as an easy way to get troops around to still unrest.
Otherwise, I would think you’d have to do it in a passive way. Stuff like drainage channels made so that parts or the city could be cut off by destroying bridges. Or maybe design streets to limit line-of-sight past a certain range. Or streets laid out to channelize advancing enemies, and so on. Bridges designed with demolition in mind (i.e. the designing engineers design in demolition points) Maybe even berms/dikes/topographic features to deny access, and disguised as regular old engineering works.
The hard part would be that the city would have to have an integrated defensive plan of some kind, as well as military engineers on staff to make sure that new developments/improvements tie into the larger defensive plan.
Any design meant to result in explosions or collapses in wartime is likely to cause unintended trouble in peacetime.
The best a big city like Kyiv can do, which it is already doing, is just to place huge amounts of obstacles and barricades everywhere. Not only can they block tanks, but they provide additional places for missile teams and snipers. And with all those buildings, there are already a million perches for snipers to begin with.
All good examples were already said.
I can add fortresses to the list: in Salses, the stairs have uneven steps, so an attacker will trip; some gates are at 90°, so you must turn your back to enter ; there are holes at foot level were spears can be inserted ; the whole road is made for an attacker to present his right flank (without the shield) to the fire ; the road is uphill so an attacker will tire quickly…
Good point - have roads at the end of bridges or across open spots turn, exposing a convoy side on, limiting speed, etc.
One item I read said that Napoleon found “a whiff of grapeshot” effective crowd control, and Hauptman later ran with this idea. The wide straight avenues allow a way to break up any mob into smaller pieces and presents wide open spaces where the cannons can effectively clear the streets for a distance. The counterpoint to this would be frequent turns and T-junctions to limit an invader’s ability to see what is happening further on, present more ambush opportunities.
Make the stairs in buildings like NYC fire escapes, where the bottom flight can be lifted up to prevent access from the ground floor; add other stairwells or ladderways that have no ground floor access, bypass the ground floor for basement access. I like the idea posted earlier of tunnel access between buildings to allow movement without exposure.
Based on news today - build the supply infrastructure to be resilient. The internet was designed - mesh structure, routing protocols - to survive losing multiple nodes. It’s a mesh rather than a tree structure. I wonder if the same can be done with natural gas supply lines, water and sewer, phone, electricity etc. (Even broadcast systems) have multiple supply routes to any area, so one hit on a major line only affects a small area. I imagine, for example, flap valves in the water system designed so if the flow becomes excessive - i.e. the other end is an open hole - the valve will shut to prevent further loss of pressure. Don’t run main supply lines down main streets, so they are less obvious targets.
The trouble with all these suggestions is of course, cost. You have to be really afraid of an invasion or other catastrophe to incorporate such redundancy designs.
Well, based on the historical record, Archimedes probably didn’t actually do it, but he could have. Basically, what you need is not one parabolic mirror, but a whole hillside of soldiers each holding one plane mirror, and a contrivance that lets each of them individually aim and track the bright spot from their own mirror. @CalMeacham developed one system that could be used for that, and which would have been accessible to Archimedes, and it’s been tested and was able to successfully ignite a boat.
9/11 used the design of the WTC as a weapon. There is a video of bin Laden discussing this.
we calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower. We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all. (…Inaudible…) due to my experience in this field, I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area where the plane hit and all the floors above it only. This is all that we had hoped for.
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/binladentext121301.html
BS anecdote time: the 1969 Brutalist Humanities building at the University of Madison was, according to student legend, designed as a fortress to repel student riots. Supposedly the sloped ‘glacis’ was meant to be defendable with water cannons to wash protestors away from the entrances.
The interior was no better - see this video:
Weaponized against the inhabitants of the building! Venting fumes into interior spaces! Slip-and-fall hazards! Expansion joints that can drop a whole wing!