Artillery
Inherent design flaws in early 17th century Swedish leather cannons led to the gun tube overheating which prematurely ignited the gunpowder, injuring the loader.
After the cooking off of artillery shells in the G5 howitzers in the late 1980s, the South African Army changed commands from "cease fire" to "cease loading". This allowed crews to fire any loaded shells to prevent them from heating up and exploding.
Read more about this topic: Cooking Off
Famous quotes containing the word artillery:
“We now demand the light artillery of the intellect; we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused—in place of the verbose, the detailed, the voluminous, the inaccessible. On the other hand, the lightness of the artillery should not degenerate into pop-gunnery—by which term we may designate the character of the greater portion of the newspaper press—their sole legitimate object being the discussion of ephemeral matters in an ephemeral manner.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)
“Another success is the post-office, with its educating energy augmented by cheapness and guarded by a certain religious sentiment in mankind; so that the power of a wafer or a drop of wax or gluten to guard a letter, as it flies over sea over land and comes to its address as if a battalion of artillery brought it, I look upon as a fine meter of civilization.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)