Surfing around Instapundit, we come to
this little blurb that says the Army wants a parachuiting tank. Really? Well, who doesn't?
The only problem is, it ain't a tank, and you can parachute anything once. We tried it once, with the
M551 A-Cav vehicle, a lousy armored cav vehicle, but a hell of a lot of fun to drive. Great automotive system, lousy turret.
It was air-mobile, and air-droppable, but it became a stationary pillbox after you dropped it. Like I said earlier, you can drop anything once.
Thanks for the memories.
3 comments:
I've played with those. Firing the 152mm HEAT-MP from that gun caused the front end to jump a foot and half off the ground with recoil. Heaven help you if the driver didn't have the brakes locked or if you weren't hanging on for dear life when it popped.
The Shillelagh missile it fired was also a bit problematic, with at tendency to get confused about its purpose in life.
The Soviets had a better heavy air-drop system. Their cargo chute harness was built with retro-rockets which fired when the load was about 4 or 5 meters off the ground. The rockets almost completely arrested the downward movement of the load just off the ground, giving a VERY soft landing. They built this system big enough to airdrop main battle tanks. I don't have stats on it's frequency of success, but they still use a form of it for their returning space capsule
Rivrdog
Never operated on them but I do remember watching "gunfights" in the motor pool with the CBSS and grease packed rag wads. Could knock a guy down from 50 feet away. Did have the gun/missile system on the M60A2 (spit). Abortion of a system.
Post a Comment