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#51
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The SUU23 pod gun on the F4 centerline would pull the nose down - the
pipper would start to move down on the target about half a second after firing began, but it was easily compensated with a little aft pressure in the stick. I once fired a 3-second burst (doing a little pre-combat research) beginning at 4500 feet from the ground target (acoustic scorer) and scored 100 hits. FWIW the pod gun's dispersion was such that it would make a good 'shotgun' for the knife fight'. The SUU23's shot pattern was about 8 mils in elevation and about 10 in azimuth; still a pretty concentrated pattern at 100 yards - the length of an American football field, and a familiar distance to most US fighter pilots. The 366th Wing at Danang had an F4E (call sign Chico) with two wing-mounted SUU23s plus the nose gun. It was hogged by the 0-6s who took it out on troops-in-contact calls. Would have made a heck of a dog fighter because you could take any kind of shot with a good chance of a kill - including those hairy head-on passes. Walt BJ |
#52
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Superior avionics do not make a superior pilot.
Certainly not, but all else equal, they make a superior weapons system! The A-10 uses three different A-A sights, and these sights use pilot inputs of enemy aircraft airspeed, wingspan, and fuselage length. These inputs are usually set up pre-mission (they can be set in the air as well, just time-consuming) and the pilot can cycle through the presets in flight. All three sights are displayed on the HUD at the same time. A-10 pilots who go through weapons school and get to shoot at the dart (towed target) say the gun is deadly accurate out to the A-A tac effective range, which is a lot farther than an M61A1. Granted, it's not a maneuvering target, but it does prove the sight(s) works. My take on this would be that you're using gun sights that are 40's-50's era in their accuracy against maneuvering targets. I would think that would put you at a serious disadvantaged (especially when couple with the lower a-a training of attack pilots vs. fighter pilots). How flexible would the preprogrammed sites be for fighting a Viper vs. a Turkey or Eagle (with much larger wingspans and lengths- or a Mig-29 vs. Su-27)? Also, assuming he'd be slashing from the vertical, what would that do to lessen the range difference (his bullets with gravity, yours against?). I appreciate that a good pilot is worth more than a super-duper-great-jet, and I also appreciate that there are circumstances when a Hog could be a nasty opponent. I just think that against an equally good pilot in a fighter jet, the Hog would be in serious trouble. But that's just an opinion from an armchair pilot with no time under his ass in either a Hog or a fighter. Thanks for your comments Hog Driver, they're most appreciated. Regards, Tony Volk p.s.- 74th squadron or not, all Hogs should have shark mouths (or hog tusks)! |
#53
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In message , Hog Driver
writes ----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul J. Adam" That's an extremely large "if", given the extensive air-to-air sensor suite fitted to the A-10... Well, using AWACS and mutual support tactics, the A-10 pilots are going to have an idea where to pick up the tally. Again, AWACS is situation-dependent, and there's that oft-quoted statistic about 80% of surviving pilots wondering who shot them down (tracking that statistic to a source is probably good for a PhD thesis - anyone up for funding it? ) Once that happens, it isn't the best 'suite' that is going to win the fight, it's the best BFM to get to the WEZ. Depends what weapons the assorted combatants brought to the fight: for many engagements, the A-10 is totally defensive and manoevering against RWR indications. (Does it have any IRWR gear? It's a natural platform to get some sort of missile-warning gear over RWR) Again, for real life this isn't much of a problem because the A-10 operates in total air supremacy and has never had an enemy aircraft ever get a chance to shoot at it (rendering the preparations of the A-10 crews to fight back untested). Are you keeping your ordnance for this turn? How long does it take to get the nose pointed at the target while still having time to get that shot off? (driving your required detection range). How much airspeed do you have left at the end of it, which has a serious effect on your ability to escape the wingman? And what happens when you discover the attacking aircraft was firing a missile, rather than making a gun pass? It all depends upon the situation. Hopefully the A-10 pilot(s) pick up the tally at least 3 or 4 miles out near 3 or 9 o'clock, coming out of a good RMD. Then they only have slightly more than 90 degrees to get the nose to bear. Even with all the ordnance still on the jet, at the most a six to seven second turn in the A-10 not including reaction lag time. Again, depending on lots of factors, they may get nose-on in time to hose off a sidewinder and open up with the gun around or slightly inside 9,000' (no peacetime TRs to worry about). Most likely it will be a beak-to-beak pass with the A-10s not getting a shot off, which they will try to drive to a one-circle if the idiot(s) hang around. If bad guy decides to go vertical, the engaged A-10 may go with him energy dependant and hose off a sidewinder to give him sometime to think about, even with an opening Vc. Smart A-10 driver won't continue uphill, instead try to keep tally and get a circle of hogs going. Good to hear some of my WAGs confirmed I guess you could describe my position thusly... A-10s engaged by modern fighters are in bad trouble, but have a few cards to play (low altitude, high turn rate and large countermeasure magazines come to mind) while they can give over-aggressive enemy fighters some very nasty problems to solve. If the A-10s get any ordnance off prior to the merge, it might coax the bad guy into thinking twice about keeping his fangs out. Since the primary A-10 role is to kill them by the bushels instead of one at a time, most A-10 pilots won't hit the emer jett until they get wrapped up with the guy for 180 degrees of turn. Do you have options short of "full jettison"? I freely confess that my flying experience is limited to civil propjobs and computer games, but does the A-10 have (for instance) any option to jettison A/G ordnance while keeping outboard pylons (Sidewinders and jammer pods)? Again, situation dependent, lots of 'what ifs' that you can't know about until you are there. This is too true, sadly, and imposes all sorts of limits on open debate. In answer to your airspeed question, the A-10 will be headed downhill the entire time to maintain corner velocity, and if he's coming out of RMD, he should know what's coming so he'll probably be carrying extra knots for the initial turn at the merge. Trouble with that is, how do you get that energy back, especially if you started out low? Bear in mind that if there are enemy fighters up and flying, their IADS is probably still operational complete with radar-guided SAMs. (And, given recent experience, what if the Bad Guys have orders that "anything you can shoot at is hostile" while their fighters have stern orders to stay high and fast no matter how tempting the diving target?) But then, this keeps coming back to Bad Guys who can mount a credible air threat. Not sure where to find a likely enemy that can seriously sustain any sort of counter-air operations against the US... The smart A-10 pilot will be flaring and chaffing early and often in anticipation of that missile shot you are talking about...and keeping the jet moving. Again, that's keeping the A-10 defensive rather than having it turn and fight an attacking Su-27 or similar... just because If this analysis was accurate, the F-15 and F-22 would be screaming for 27mm or 30mm guns... I think we both know that the possibility of air-to-air gun fighting today is highly unlikely. Lessons learned from the past would behoove us to have them on our jets, or in the case of the A-10, use them to really screw up the bad guys on the ground. I hate to be contrarian... all right, I don't. I _like_ being contrarian. Lessons from the past suggest that getting missiles working and crews trained is a better path to dead enemies for air-to-air work. Air-to-ground, guns pull you into IR-SAM range and even for A-10s that isn't healthy. The initial question asked was how multi-barrel and single barrel cannons stack up, and the subject is best dogfight guns. Just because the A-10 is built around the GAU-8 doesn't mean it is any less of an effective dogfight gun, especially with the high rates of turn the A-10 is capable of, small bullet dispersion over the tac effective range, and relatively high rate of fire. Sure, just as a modern bayonet is a miserable weapon compared to a Light Infantry sword (a proper sword that just happened to have fittings to mount onto a Baker rifle... beat _that_ for close quarters combat! Other than by eschewing melee and throwing in a grenade, or shooting the enemy, or otherwise cheating...) One 2Lt Patton wrote the US Army's last swordsmanship manual... doesn't make swords a useful weapon, whatever the advantages his technique had over the enemy's _code duello_, if you find yourself trying to use a sabre against an enemy with a pistol (or, worse, an enemy luring you into the beaten zone of a machinegun) I'd hazard that where a credible air-to-air threat might exist then the A-10's Sidewinder and countermeasure fit becomes of more importance than its gun loadout, however reassuring the gun is as a weapon of last extremity. -- When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite. W S Churchill Paul J. Adam MainBoxatjrwlynch[dot]demon{dot}co(.)uk |
#55
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In message , Alan Minyard
writes Much better to go with an M-61 variant that actually works, is combat proven, and has a useful rate of fire. Trouble is, this gets you back where the US was in 1950; the M3 .50" was a superb gun in terms of reliability, ballistics and rate of fire and was a thoroughly proven weapon. Trouble is, nobody convinced the MiG-15s of that fact, so they soaked up a _lot_ of hits where a larger-calibre weapon would have made the F-86 versus MiG-15 kill ratio even _more_ impressive. -- When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite. W S Churchill Paul J. Adam MainBoxatjrwlynch[dot]demon{dot}co(.)uk |
#56
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"Paul J. Adam" wrote in message ... In message , Hog Driver writes ----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul J. Adam" snip I think we both know that the possibility of air-to-air gun fighting today is highly unlikely. Lessons learned from the past would behoove us to have them on our jets, or in the case of the A-10, use them to really screw up the bad guys on the ground. I hate to be contrarian... all right, I don't. I _like_ being contrarian. Lessons from the past suggest that getting missiles working and crews trained is a better path to dead enemies for air-to-air work. Air-to-ground, guns pull you into IR-SAM range and even for A-10s that isn't healthy. Paul, doing away with a tool from your kit without a compelling reason to do so, along with having a danged foolproof method of handling the situations that said tool could handle, is unwise. As to air-to-ground use, I believe the resident Strike Eagle driver has already provided a reason for retaining a strafe capability, i.e., recent operations in Afghanistan. During Anaconda the need for up-close-and-personal support (read that as well within the danger-close margin) was reported. You can't *always* use your LGB's or JDAM's, which is why the grunts liked the cannon armed aircraft during that fight. Yes, it brings the air in within MANPADS range--but that is a risk those guys are willing to accept when the fight on the ground gets hairy (and thank goodness for that). Arguing that they can't (or never should) face such a risk is a bit illogical--if all services followed that thought process, we'd stop issuing rifles to infantrymen because in order to use one you have to close to within the effective range of the other guy's weapons. The initial question asked was how multi-barrel and single barrel cannons stack up, and the subject is best dogfight guns. Just because the A-10 is built around the GAU-8 doesn't mean it is any less of an effective dogfight gun, especially with the high rates of turn the A-10 is capable of, small bullet dispersion over the tac effective range, and relatively high rate of fire. Sure, just as a modern bayonet is a miserable weapon compared to a Light Infantry sword (a proper sword that just happened to have fittings to mount onto a Baker rifle... beat _that_ for close quarters combat! Other than by eschewing melee and throwing in a grenade, or shooting the enemy, or otherwise cheating...) One 2Lt Patton wrote the US Army's last swordsmanship manual... doesn't make swords a useful weapon, whatever the advantages his technique had over the enemy's _code duello_, if you find yourself trying to use a sabre against an enemy with a pistol (or, worse, an enemy luring you into the beaten zone of a machinegun) But there are tasks for which that bayonet is oh-so-much better than say, an M16A2 with state-of-the-art night optics. I saw a fair amount of peanut butter spread with bayonets; had we had to use our M16's for that it would have been rather messy. Now that is I admit a rather extreme example, but again it points out the wisdom of retaining those tools we have even in the face of longer ranged/more lethal options. Brooks snip |
#57
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Scott Ferrin wrote in message . ..
On 8 Dec 2003 10:14:03 +0100, (Urban Fredriksson) wrote: In article , Keith Willshaw wrote: Then again the control authority of modern aorcraft is higher and the fly by wire control system can compensate for gyroscopic forces rather better than a human being. And assymetric recoil as well I assume, but I think I read that test firing of the F-22's gun induced yaw, but little enough that the pilot easily could compensate, which must mean the FCS doesn't try to. The would really surprise me as the thing tries to use control surfaces to account for little bumps and gusts on the runway :-) I understand that pressing the firing button for the off-centre gun in the F-16 and F-15 automatically adjusts the rudder to compensate for yaw. Tony Williams Military gun and ammunition website: http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk Discussion forum at: http://forums.delphiforums.com/autogun/messages/ |
#58
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"Hog Driver" wrote in message ...
"Ron" wrote in message ... Smart A-10 driver won't continue uphill, instead try to keep tally and get a circle of hogs going. Exactly what one of my Viper friends was faced with, going up against some Battle Creek A-10s....Never was able to get a shot off I have some great guncamera footage of an A-10 saddling up on a Viper who had two full bags of gas and decided to stick with the Hog and slow down...the A-10 driver was also tuned into the F-16s VHF air-air freq, and the Viper driver says, "I don't believe it...I'm about to get gunned by a Hog!" Sure enough, a few seconds later guns-track-kill by the Hog on the floundering Viper. Incidentally, a three-barrel lightweight version of the GAU-8/A was developed, firing the same ammo at 2,000 rpm. It was known as the CHAG (compact, high-performance aircraft gun IIRC) and would I expect have been fitted to modern fighters instead of the M61 if the gun had remained more important in air combat. Tony Williams Military gun and ammunition website: http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk Discussion forum at: http://forums.delphiforums.com/autogun/messages/ |
#59
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Scott Ferrin wrote in message . ..
On 8 Dec 2003 03:59:15 -0800, (Tony Williams) wrote: "Tony Volk" wrote in message ... I have been setting up some scenaries with the LO-MAC "Lock On- Modern Air Combat" Sim/Game, involving A-10s vs Su27/33, and it often is not too pretty for the Su's in a head on merge..The A-10s gun does a good job of reaching out and touching someone But if the Su survives that, then the A-10 is at a bad disadvantage. I have to get that game myself, but it brings up an important point. What are the avionics behind the gun? I'd imagine that an A-10 would lack an accurate a-a mode for aiming its gun. The same thing applies to the other guns mentioned in the debate. A gun's merits are important, but they don't mean squat if it's impossible to hit anything with it! The laser-rangefinders on the latest Russian jets (e.g., Su-27 series, Mig-29 too I believe) stand out as an excellent example of using superior avionics to make a gun more effective. Anything similar on the Rafale, Grippen, Raptor? I understand that the SAAB Viggen armed with Oerlikon KCA has an 'AutoAim' system which effectively takes over the autopilot and aims the plane at the designated target to ensure that the gun is properly aimed. This enables engagement at up to 3,000m in a head-on attack. From what I've read (albeit it was years ago) the KCA hits damn near as hard as the GAU-8. It just doesn't have the rate of fire. The 30x173 cartridge for the GAU-8/A was actually 'borrowed' from the KCA, the most obvious difference being that the KCA's ammo is steel-cased rather than aluminium alloy. The power of the HE rounds is exactly the same. The KCA was adopted by the USA as the GAU-9/A, in case the 8A failed (the A-10 would have had two KCAs). As I've posted elsewhere on this thread, as well as the podded four-barrel GAU-13/A version of the GAU-8/A, a lightweight three-barrel CHAG version in 30x173 was also produced, firing at 2,000 rpm. That would have been interesting.... It's worth noting that the current Russian 30x165 ammo isn't that much less powerful than the 30x173, and they do make a six-barrel rotary, the GSh-6-30, which fires at 5,000 rpm and weighs only 160kg (M61 = 114 kg, GAU-8/A = 281 kg). If you really want bang for your buck, you can't do much better than that, but the Russians only ever fitted it to the MiG-27 for ground-attack. Tony Williams Military gun and ammunition website: http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk Discussion forum at: http://forums.delphiforums.com/autogun/messages/ |
#60
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As I've posted elsewhere on this thread, as well as the podded four-barrel GAU-13/A version of the GAU-8/A, I saw a picture once of the original Strike Eagle with three of those babies on it. :-) a lightweight three-barrel CHAG version in 30x173 was also produced, firing at 2,000 rpm. That would have been interesting.... It's worth noting that the current Russian 30x165 ammo isn't that much less powerful than the 30x173, and they do make a six-barrel rotary, the GSh-6-30, which fires at 5,000 rpm and weighs only 160kg (M61 = 114 kg, GAU-8/A = 281 kg). If you really want bang for your buck, you can't do much better than that, but the Russians only ever fitted it to the MiG-27 for ground-attack. Tony Williams Military gun and ammunition website: http://www.quarry.nildram.co.uk Discussion forum at: http://forums.delphiforums.com/autogun/messages/ |
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