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Post by <[Iron Man]> on Apr 20, 2005 17:40:22 GMT
I know this is speculation but i like to speculate! Say for arguments sake that the British Military were equipped with Gas Masks, would it have been enough to defend against the Black Gas? Or is the Black Gas more similar to Mustard Gas in that it can go through clothing and through your skin pores ? It is ironic though that the Martians used Chemical warfare just before we had invented the Gas Mask.
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Post by mctoddridesagain on Apr 20, 2005 19:53:55 GMT
Who knows? Problem is we don't know the properties of the Black Smoke, or rather probably not enough to tell what sort of mask would be needed, though I imagine that speculation will be rife.
Is it a nerve gas? Is it a blistering agent? Is it an asphyxiating gas? Is it something completely different?
As for the irony, well of course Wells was speculating about the potential weapons industrialised society would produce - in that respect WotW is allegorical - so there isn't really any irony, just great perspicacity.
And as with most things there had been precursors (the use of choking smoke centuries earlier, just as ancient times saw the origins of biological warfare with rotting and diseased corpses catapulted into besieged cities). Jules Verne, ever seen as the optimist, depicted an evil Prussian Krupp-lookalike developing a gigantic cannon to fire carbonic acid gas shells in 'The Begum's Fortune' of 1879; and the military and political mind was alive enough to the possibility of poison gas to outlaw it at the first Hague Declaration of 1899 before anyone had even tried using it!
So, having thrown in my pennyworth, on with the debate!
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Post by Stewymartian on Apr 20, 2005 20:42:46 GMT
The black smoke is described as a kind of heavier than air inky vapour. It does not act like a true gas in that it doesn't mix readily with the air and it remains confined to where it was laid. In this way it is very like certain chemical agents (blistering agents like mustard come to mind here).
Although Wells doesn't disclose how the black smoke worked in detail he does state that it acts upon the blood to cause death. It is also stated that it becomes inactive once it comes into contact with water, thus not only is it the one of the first descriptions of chemical warfare, but probably the first ever description of a non-persistent chemical agent.
From the description it seems that it is only fatal if inhaled, although of course this would have been impossible to establish as a fact because if you were close enough to get it on your skin then you were close enough to breath it in.....
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Post by Mr Death Ray on Apr 22, 2005 15:09:51 GMT
I believe 'gas hoods' were around in Well's time. 19th century ones just consisted of a bag with goggles and a pipe going from it attatching to the legs.
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Post by <[Iron Man]> on Apr 22, 2005 16:37:16 GMT
Sounds a little cumbersome?
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Post by Bayne on Apr 22, 2005 23:12:57 GMT
[glow=red,2,300]I rather liked the enclosed suit in the last pages of the Scarlet Traces Graphic Novel...
Blach Hat miniatures have some nice pith helmet and gas mask wargaming miniatures... [/glow]
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Post by I own a cylinder on Apr 27, 2005 10:09:21 GMT
I hav often wondered, away from the finer details of the book, the Black Smoke is obviously a precurser to chemical warfare seen in WW1 (i.e. mustard gas et al.) Would the Martians use of a gas to remove opposition have forced forward the development of the gas mask.
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Post by <[Iron Man]> on Apr 27, 2005 22:43:21 GMT
If we were somehow given much more time then possibly yes, or it may have eventually developed into a WW1 style conflict?
Interesting thought...
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Post by mctoddridesagain on Apr 27, 2005 23:12:45 GMT
I doubt it would. Both sides got bogged down in the trenches in 1914 because they were reasonably evenly matched. Gas didn't prove to be decisive in offence, it merely made life infinitely more unpleasant for the troops without actually breaking the deadlock.
The Martians were very mobile, they were the supreme exponents of the blitzkrieg decades before the Germans practised it in 1939. Think of the French in 1940 - they were anticipating a static conflict along 1915 lines, what they got was something very different, and they crumbled pronto.
The mobile and devastatingly better armed Martians of 1898 simply wouldn't have let the situation bog down. The situation for them was far more analogous to Western armies against third world tribesmen.
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