Helicopter gun at LONG range

"Bill Silvey" wrote in message om...

Further example: I don't think the pentagon was counting pennies when they
first used LGBs in Vietnam to drop a bridge that had withstood conventional
bombardment for the better part of a decade...


It's probably the case that the air force found one guided bomb much cheaper than
many failed conventional missions. Sometimes expensive weapons
are the cheapest solutions.

"Bill Silvey" wrote in message om...
"Charles Talleyrand" wrote in message


Missiles often cost more than the target.

Nonsense. If it kills the target, it paid for itself. There's no point in
trying to play accountant as well as CP/G.

I believe this argument when taken to extremes will have negative result.
If every target deserves the most expensive munition then many targets
will have no munitions. And of course excessive cheapness taken to
extremes will also have negative results. Cannot we both agree that
somewhere in the middle is the correct answer?


Missile expensive? You bet!
But guess what? There's a plant in California that'll make *all of them you
want*.

Hm. I was under the impression that the Pentagon had a limited budget,
and could not in fact afford all the missiles it wanted.

Heck, I can promise you a Hellfire costs more than most cars - yet a
Hellfire was used to destroy a car-full of al-Qeda terrorists a year or so
back. Should the UAV pilot have waved off and not killed 'em?

Of course not. The correct comparision is not the cost of the missile
vs. the cost of the car. The correct comparision is the cost of the missile
vs the lives of the "car-full" of terrorists and the damage they would
likely do us.

"Tony Williams" wrote in message m...
The ultimate range limitation given current helicopter installations
would be the maximum elevation permitted by the turret. The AH-64's
gun is limited to only 11 degrees (the French THL turret manages up to
30 degrees, the AH-1's M197 20 degrees).

Hmm. Good point. A new helicopter might have different limits, but we'll
be using the existing fleet for a long time.

The ballistic charactistics of the projectiles is also an issue. At
extreme range short aircraft cannon shells like the western 20mm and
30mm may lose stability and start tumbling. The Russian 30mm is much
better; the shells are much heavier and will carry further, but their
mountings don't have the elevation.

I don't know enough to understand this. Is tumbling bad? I understood for
something like a personal rifle it was a good thing in that it maximzed damage.



Then there's the stability of a helicopter as a gun platform. I
suspect that dispersion at long range would be considerable.


Sure. But if it's good enough at 1000 meters to hit a truck, then at 10,000
meters it should hit an area with a diameter of 10 trucks. That's a small
area given enough rounds on target. Of course I'm going beyond my area of
expertise here.



All-in-all, probably a non-starter for any practical purposes.

Tony Williams
Military gun and ammunition website: http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk
Discussion forum at: http://forums.delphiforums.com/autogun/messages/

Not l-o-n-g range, but 10,000 ft plus slant range at altitude. Stand off is
a mile to mile and a half.

You get precision weaponry and a killing projectile (105mm) on most targets.

If you need something bigger, just lase it from orbit and let the bombers
hit it.
--
Les
F-4C(WW),D,E,G(WW)/AC-130A/MC-130E EWO (ret)




"Charles Talleyrand" wrote in message
...

"Les Matheson" wrote in message
news:kqj_a.14642$ug.9879@lakeread01...
Perfect weapon system exists, the AC-130H or U. 40 and 105MM guns on
target
for a long time.

Can and does an AC-130 fire at LONG range in an arced trajectory? And if
it works for
an AC-130, might it also work for an AH-64?

I don't know enough to understand this. Is tumbling bad? I understood for
something like a personal rifle it was a good thing in that it maximzed
damage.

If you want to penetrate an armored vehicle, a tumbling, unstabilized round is
useless.

"Charles Talleyrand" wrote in message


I don't know enough to understand this. Is tumbling bad? I
understood for something like a personal rifle it was a good
thing in that it maximzed damage.

A round that tumbles in flight is bad. Some Small arms rounds tumble when
they enter flesh, which increases their wounding potential. But if this
happens before hitting a target, the rounds are liable to go anywhere but
where you aim them. If they do hit something, they will have very poor
penetration.

--
Tom Schoene Replace "invalid" with "net" to e-mail
"If brave men and women never died, there would be nothing
special about bravery." -- Andy Rooney (attributed)

"Charles Talleyrand" wrote in message ...

I'm not arguing it's the end-all and be-all of warfare. I'm not even
sure the limited opportunities are worth the cost of software and
training. But maybe ???

Mostly I'm asking if there are any technical problems and if they could
be overcome.

Technical problems would be locating the target and determining the
bearing/range/azimuth for the cannon to land the rounds in the area.
The only way a helo can do that is to see the target long enough to
bounce a laser rangefinder off it, and if they're going to that much
trouble of terrain masking and popping up to spot it, they're already
in place for *direct* cannon fire onto the target area, so no need to
back off and try for less-effective indirect. And in a worst-case
scenario where the target is hot enough to make a cannon attack
hazardous, then the best thing for the crew to do is radio in
coordinates and turn tail. Let someone with a better setup make the
shot.

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.

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.

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?

First the gun can't shoot 10 miles. Second, You can't tell friend of foe from that far
out. If you want to reach out an touch some one, you call on a fire mission. Not a
Apache, wasting ammo.