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Old 1st Apr 2009, 13:36
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Agaricus bisporus
 
Join Date: Dec 1999
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Interesting that the sites 20Km W of mungo's 40° 27'19.80"N 93° 45'09.14"E have been used as bombing targets or ordnance testing. The big squares - one at the end of the "runway" the other on its own just to the W are peppered with craters, some may be grouped. The blue buildings in a grouphave been whacked too.

Someone went to huge effort to grade the big 850m to the W square as flat as that, some of the edges must be 15-20m above the surrounding terrain. What needs a flat, level square that size?

The Erik Von Danikens of 5000years time would have a field day over that!

Scale representations of Taiwanese street scapes and air bases perhaps?
How about this is a testing range for some kind of terrain mapping delivery system - cruise missiles etc - with final waypoints simulating a stylised streetscape and targets beyond to verify damage to hardstanding (the concrete squares) and an "erasable" area to verify scatter patterns and accuracy of cluster weapons. Look at Taiwanese urban street layouts, they bear a remarkable resemblance to the grids here.

Note how the "runways" are untouched, yet the "hardstandings" are unusable. That's what you'd want if you needed to destroy the other guy's fleet on the ground, and use runway yourself later.

Holes range from about 1 to 3.5m across. How big a munition does it take to do that? Cluster bomb size?

Last edited by Agaricus bisporus; 1st Apr 2009 at 15:43.
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