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Old 06-20-2013, 12:47 AM
Ben41 Ben41 is offline
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Default Incendiary Bottle

A page was recently created for an incendiary bottle aka, the Molotov Cocktail: http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Incendiary_Bottle. The page states that this was an actual device used by the Red Army, but it's still a bottle with a flammable liquid in it. I am wondering if this page should stay or not. Please give your thoughts.
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Old 06-20-2013, 01:15 AM
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funkychinaman funkychinaman is offline
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I always thought the objection against Molotovs was based on the fact that most of them were improvised, and not because it's a bottle with flammable liquid inside.
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Old 06-20-2013, 01:21 AM
Mandolin Mandolin is offline
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The grammar is terrible, sounds like he copy-pasted the Russian wiki page on the Molotov into Google translate and posted the resulting mess. Want me to clean it up or delete the history? And I think Molotovs should not get a page.
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Old 06-20-2013, 06:27 AM
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Evil Tim Evil Tim is offline
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Molotovs shouldn't get a page, but this is somewhat different in that it's factory-produced to an actual standard with a percussion igniter, not just an anonymous bottle of liquid. This, for example, is a Finnish petrol bomb manufactured by the state alcohol company Alko, this and this are Italian, this is German, this is American (with an M1 classification, even), this is Japanese, and so on. In all cases these are basically mass-produced incendiary grenades that happen to have glass bodies.

Whether it should have a page would depend on whether we're going to call it an explosive (in which case no) or a grenade (in which case precedent says yes). Not sure it's worth having a page for only one appearance anyway, though.

It's moot, though, since the devices in the movie have a cigarette and a match as fuzes, not a percussion igniter. Pandofini says the second is a decent facsimile of a Russian No 1 or 2 Incendiary Bottle, but the one with a cigarette I doubt is anything. I can't find anything on the Russian ones, which is weird since I seem to have found everyone else's glass-body grenades while searching.

Last edited by Evil Tim; 06-20-2013 at 06:51 AM.
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Old 06-20-2013, 10:20 AM
commando552 commando552 is offline
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I've seen one of the bottles for the Russian ones, and if nothing else the whole front of the bottle is covered with a paper label with instruction in cyrillic, so it isn't a match for the one in "Dnieper Line: Love and War". Also the genuine Russian ones were just sealed with a cork rather than wax.

As you say the ignition system is wrong, but i'm not sure that this is technically part of the weapon anyway, as I had never heard of the percussion method before and though they were ignited with a a breakable glass ampule attached to the side which auto-ignited in air when broken with the rest of the bottle. I have also read about the fact that often there were no igniter provided with the Russian ones, so standard procedure was to either make your own of to throw a KS self igniting one first followed by a number of conventional ones.

TBH I find the whole page a bit farcicle, as there will never be a genuine one used and in terms of mocking one up there wasn't that much standardisation with the grenades anyway, being made of whatever bottles were available and having different or no igniters. The only constant is the mixture which will not be real in a film anyway, so in essence we are ID'ing a 75cl wine bottle.

With other weapons that have only appeared mocked up, that is fine as there is effort put into making them and people may conceivably believe they are a real weapon. With this though it is just a bottle that someone has attached a match to with a bit of electrical tape (pretty sure that is wrong for a real No. 3 Incendiary Bottle) and filled with cold tea or food colouring, and nobody is going to look at that and think "I wonder what production weapon that is".
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Old 06-20-2013, 10:28 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by commando552 View Post
With this though it is just a bottle that someone has attached a match to with a bit of electrical tape (pretty sure that is wrong for a real No. 3 Incendiary Bottle) and filled with cold tea or food colouring, and nobody is going to look at that and think "I wonder what production weapon that is".
I think with most of these it would be an all-weather match rather than the normal-looking one there; like I said, I can't find any information on it one way or the other but Pandofini's comment implied that the No 1 or 2 used a match like the Finnish ones did. I guess it could go in that potential "other weapons" page if we ever got one that was a decent mock-up of a real production model, though.

Basically my take on this is I don't think a glass-bodied grenade fundamentally doesn't qualify, but I don't think this one does because one ID is very weak (I can't verify that the No 1 / 2 used a match and I doubt it's the right kind of match anyway) and the other seems to be using a cigarette instead of an igniter.

Last edited by Evil Tim; 06-20-2013 at 10:40 AM.
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