"John Hairell" wrote in message
...
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.

Not necessarily a problem I would have thought?


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?

Wouldn't recoil be quite a major problem as well?

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". ;-)

Yep.

John