Unknown Practice / Drill Bomblet

[Depotman]

Any i.d. on this ugly beast?! It's a pale brown plastic, no markings, 50mm dia and 215mm long.

[HAZORD]

Looks like a variant of dummy M118 Rockeye antiarmor submunition (U.S.)

[US-Subs]

Actually its a spacer for the dispenser which carries the Rockeyes. There are a couple variations, same basic shape but two lengths.

[US-Subs]

As described.

[cornman]

I also have such a spacer. I knew that these are used in the Rockeye, but for what purpose are these used?
Why a spacer an not a real bomblet?

Regards, Cornman

[25thapril]

G'day Hazard and US -subs you two gentlemen appear to be the ones to answer my question is this a dummy/drill rockeye and which country uses orange paint as you can see I also have another submunition with exactly the same paint could you please let me know. Thank you
Kind regards Daryl

[US-Subs]

Cornman, the dispenser for the Rockeyes (and others as well) has a tapered ogive at the nose, for aerodynamic purposes. With a small diameter, long length submunition like the rockeye, this leaves dead space near the curved area. Engineers for the Rockeye elected to fill the deadspace with partial load pieces. More often in other dispensers this is done with spacers built directly into the dispenser itself. the Rockeye is one of the very few (to my knowledge) that used partial size dummy pieces.

Daryl, while color codes country to country and may mean completely different things in different areas, some countries (former Warsaw Pact, NATO, etc shared common color codes. Your country shares most of its color codes with other Commonwealth nations, and thus NATO as well. The color orange is used to denote that an item is "recoverable" and is most often found on practice items, typically without a spotting charge, but with some notable exceptions. The item you have shown is a variation of a Bomb Dummy Unit (BDU) for the Bomb Live Unit-26 (BLU-26). This variation is screwed together rather than clamped, and Australia is the only place I have seen this variation. I got mine from Australian AF EOD a few years ago. Both of your items are practice, meant to be dropped.

[Taber10]

25thApril,
I would like to add to the useful information that US-Subs has provided: In the development of munitions items, tests are done to validate most steps of the stockpile to target sequence, and in the case of CBUs, the dispersion of the bomblets is tested through actual air drops. In these cases, along with drop tests of many other munitions, the orange paint greatly assists the high speed photography, and in the actual recovery of the dropped items, justifying the deviation from "normal" color coding. In some cases, even "live" and practice items with live spotting charges have been painted with high vis graphics, such as the orange you are asking about. Naturally, whenever possible, inert items are used extensively in testing. For air drops of live submunitions, there are only a few places (for example, specific impact areas at Hill, Eglin, and White Sands) where the USAF typically carries out this type of testing, to limit the safety and range maintenance issues--at least during the time I was involved. Taber

[cornman]

Thanks US-Subs for you answer!

Cornman

[US-Subs]

25thApril,
I would like to add to the useful information that US-Subs has provided: In the development of munitions items, tests are done to validate most steps of the stockpile to target sequence, and in the case of CBUs, the dispersion of the bomblets is tested through actual air drops. In these cases, along with drop tests of many other munitions, the orange paint greatly assists the high speed photography, and in the actual recovery of the dropped items, justifying the deviation from "normal" color coding. In some cases, even "live" and practice items with live spotting charges have been painted with high vis graphics, such as the orange you are asking about. Naturally, whenever possible, inert items are used extensively in testing. For air drops of live submunitions, there are only a few places (for example, specific impact areas at Hill, Eglin, and White Sands) where the USAF typically carries out this type of testing, to limit the safety and range maintenance issues--at least during the time I was involved. Taber

I would further add that in a test environment many different colors can be used in a single test. At White Sands depending upon the level of development and related testing we might have had each submunition (ADAMs, etc) painted in a different color. This was then logged as to where it sat in the carrier.

You then can map the pieces and their location (post impact). If there is a problem with the impact pattern on the ground you can tell by the color and number of the pieces where they were in the carrier, giving clues to the root of the problem. The same thing was done with MLRS rockets on a larger scale (644 submunitions per rocket). Different colors were given to the submunitions in different warheads, so when firing a sixpack of rockets you could then determine the specific pattern of each individual rocket.

Frequently though, as Taber has mentioned, for testing color codes are non-standard, and may vary test to test. At WSMR we normally stayed with the recognized color code for the recoverable ordnance items, more unusual colors (or combinations) for the test items. Typically throughout the ordnance spectrum the orange color was most often seen on practice pieces for the Rockeyes (MK118), small practice bombs (MK 106 etc) and the BDU Variant of the BLU-85 submunition.