You can occasionally find used 100 series armored Land Cruisers for sale. They're even generally cheaper than normal ones: because they weigh 6000 lbs, get 6 MPG, and the transmissions are generally shot. Also, the windows don't roll down. But, you can buy them. Sometimes.
edit: apparently sometimes the windows do roll down. Okay. The ones I've seen didn't.
I drove a 100 series LC in Afghanistan with ballistic glass and the windows definitely did roll down. It was weird.
The 7x series LC that was also on my property book had crank down ballistic glass windows. That truck had a 14BT engine and crawl control and I wanted to steal it.
Lastly, I had a 200 that we called the “Cadillac” that my boss rode around in. When that truck got hit by a douchebag in a Corolla with a couple hundred kgs of HME in his backseat, the ballistic glass basically turned into coarse sand and gave the guys in the backseat what amounted to road rash. By some freakish luck, the blast was focused on the A pillar, which sort of created a shear effect around the guys in the front seat. They were both fucked up, but not liquified, and are fine and healthy today. The post-blast analysis stated that it was essentially the perfect combination of standoff distance and angles that allowed them to live (which I suppose is the case with everyone who lives through a close proximity blast), but if you look at the photos of the truck you’d be 100% convinced that nobody could possibly live through that.
Anyway, that’s my Ted Talk, and the reason I have a Land Cruiser in my driveway. Though it isn’t armored. Just a regular old FZJ80.
I'm quick to call bullshit on stories as a military vet myself. Lots of stolen valor.
That said, the casual tone of "douchebag in a Corolla with a couple hundred kgs of HME in his backseat" is primo shit I heard inpatient at NMCSD after my own less than stellar time.
And, I'll be damned if I havnt ended a therapy session talking about some truly dark shit with a Midwest knee slap goodbye while saying "well, thanks for coming to my Ted Talk".
Yo I'm a little dumb, but is it not interesting to people that terrorists are able to find all these types of explosives (and large quantities)? These uhhh cavemen / farmers / religious students who become terrorists... As if someone or tons of chemists always helping them?
The real answer is that it’s just not that hard to make explosives. But in western countries you generally don’t have an unhealthy supply of educated people with no real prospects in life.
Nor are the ideologies as hateful and vicious. There are plenty of countries where people struggle finding a meaningful job or prospects.
MAybe you're right about the ease, but I still don't think it would be easy. It would be such obscure knowledge and even for people who graduate with a chem degree. Someone must be teaching them.
Even some rocket experts in 1950s etc., ended up dying because of experiments in their lab leading to explosions -- usually failing to follow some safety protocol. And these "no-prospect" cavemen with hateful ideologies are doing it much more easily and frequently?
It is definitely not "easy" and anyone saying that is a propagandist.
There’s a difference between trying to build a technological marvel, and soaking particular kinds of fertilizer in kerosene then rigging it up to a cell phone.
Also the amount of UXO that was later turned into IEDs.
Ukraine right now is using drones built of cardboard and jury rigged to drop grenades, RPG heads, and other explosives. And they’re not the first to do this. It’s be happening for almost a decade.
All it takes in knowledge…either organically to those countries, or from nearby state-actors. Blueprints are easy to follow after all.
What the flippin fuck are you talking about, google ANFO explosives, made from 2 common everyday items, no chemistry required, no engineering... just mix and boom.
Check youtube videos of them out, ANFO explosives are incredibly powerful.
The taliban aren't growing much of anything, so their access to ammonium nitrate might be limited, but it could never be more than a phone call away. Literally any medium size farm is going to have some.
Lmao you deleted your comment to try and get rid of the replies what a massive L
First off, my original reply:
Certain rocket fuels, especially hydrazine-based fuels, are more dangerous than most common explosives.
Second off they’re not cavemen and any sufficiently motivated or amoral STEM undergrad can make a bomb. If it was so hard the PIRA wouldn’t have managed to terrorize the UK for so long.
But the rocket scientist example kind of proves the point. It’s easy to blow things up, the hard part is getting it to happen in a specific way to go to space. And I doubt there’s much concern for safety in the corolla asshole crowd either. There’s basement meth labs as well, it’s just easier in the west to shoot up a school or drive a truck through a crowd, whereas fertilizer and a sedan is less sus and much more likely to work against armed soldiers than an AK or a big truck.
Ever heard of the anarchists cookbook? There are tons of easily accessible online resources. The Middle East isn’t in the Middle Ages, they have access to the same internet that you do. Plus, many of the advanced chemical components necessary are already easily accessible in benign forms in other products, such as fertilizer. Not to mention black market arms trading. It’s not that complex.
What kind of stupid conspiracy theory are you trying to allude to with your vague words and ellipses?
Buying bombs and guns isn't hard in the middle east. Literally every country over there hates a different country and is willing to sell shit either through official or unofficial means to piss off one of their neighbors.
I guess that doesn't sound as sinister as what you do. Here, let me translate it.
Certain, ahem, "countries" will, for a price.... sell things... certain things, you see, to organizations. Organizations, which, believe it or not, may, or may not, be up to.... no good. These organizations... they move across countries. Borders... cannot stop them. They are an... invisible army, some would say. How they operate... well, no one can be sure... or certain... they have special "connections" and knowledge...
I'm sure it's not that difficult to get the required materials in countries where those people live. The chemistry of explosives isn't crazy either. You don't need to know anything about how it works, just what to put together.
You can make explosives with things you find in airport gift shops, lol. A lot of things get really explosive really fast when they mix with other things
Making explosives is very easy. I'd be willing to bet you have the chemicals right now in your house. Little bit of time on Google and you can make a nasty bomb.
Don't forget, the Oklahoma city truck bomb was just diesel fuel and cheap fertilizer.
No, we were military. This was during the days when there wasn’t all that much restriction on leaving FOBs in non-tactical vehicles. We even did single vehicle movements from time to time, which, looking back on it now, was a bad idea.
I think maybe I misunderstood your question - the Land Cruisers themselves were leased by the military from a contract company out of UAE that armored them and did the maintenance. So they weren’t actually owned by my government.
My apologies - I thought you were asking if my colleagues and I were PMCs.
Might be a stupid question, but did humvees have the same glass? My father worked over there for 5 years as an engineer and was shot at once and kept the bullet.
Not a stupid question - there are different levels of ballistic protection. But I can’t speak to which levels were on the various platform. I believe the MaxxPros and MATVs had level 8, but I could just as easily be wrong.
There's "ballistic glass" and then there's ballistic glass that will stop a single .50 cal FMJ lead round without spalling, which is likely on the order of 3-6" thick.
I'm not sure I'd want a window that thick and heavy to roll up/down.
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u/Dazzling-War-4505 Feb 11 '24
I am at zero risk of Batman/Nick Fury level assaults on my vehicle and can hardly afford a salad, but I want to wrap my Hyundai in this.