On Tue, 12 Aug 2003 00:20:34 -0400, "Charles Talleyrand"
wrote:

Has anyone used a helicopter cannon at LONG standoff range. By long range I mean
a range where the gun must shoot significantly above the straight line to the target
rather like a howitzer.

To do something like that you'd have to angle the cannon up through
the blades.


My vision is a helicopter standing off for safety and firing at an area. I'm assuming
if an AH-64 unloaded it's magazine at me from 10 miles away I would experience
a hail of shells all around me that would chew up every soft target including
any anti-air batteries.

The current cannon doesn't have the range, and it would take a pretty
big cannon to fire 10 miles. And why use helicopter-borne cannon fire
when you can call in longer-ranged arty?

It would take some sensor to measure range accurately (laser rangefinder) and some
software to compute tragetories, but these things need not be heavy or very expensive.

Has anyone ever even experimented or studied such an idea?


There is a solution for this problem: it's called a "missile". ;-)

John Hairell )