M24 mine
Encyclopedia
The M24 mine was a United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 off-route land mine
Land mine
A land mine is usually a weight-triggered explosive device which is intended to damage a target—either human or inanimate—by means of a blast and/or fragment impact....

 based around the M28A2 HEAT rocket normally fired by the M20 3.5 inch rocket launcher. The rocket was launched from an M143 plastic launch tube.

Operation

A trigger cable was laid across a road, when enough pressure was applied to the trigger cable two conductors inside the cable were forced together closing a circuit. The trigger cable consisted of two segments, requiring simultaneous pressure on both segments to trigger the mine. For wheeled vehicles, the cable was laid directly across the road so that wheels on both sides of the vehicle would touch the cable at the same instance, while for tracked vehicles the cable was laid at an angle of fifteen degrees to prevent the cable slipping between the treads on the tracks.

The rocket had a maximum effective range of about 30 meters beyond which it became too inaccurate to reliably strike the target.

The mine is long out of production and no longer in US service. The mine has possibly been used in Angola
Angola
Angola, officially the Republic of Angola , is a country in south-central Africa bordered by Namibia on the south, the Democratic Republic of the Congo on the north, and Zambia on the east; its west coast is on the Atlantic Ocean with Luanda as its capital city...

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