The Martlet projectiles that Dr. Bull used were both free flight and rocket-assisted and were fully instrumented. Not exactly the flimsy effort you have described!
Posted on 08/12/2016 7:21:04 PM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
Must have missed that 1992 war..... Mine was 90 for Desert Shield and 91 for Desert Storm.....
Jagdpanther carried the 88.
“Have gun. Will travel.
Wire
Paladin
San Francisco....”
But if you really have a problem call Specter or an A-10. Damn I wish they had US Army painted on their fuselage!
ps
Paladin was a great series. I am showing my age.
That was the Crusader.
This is because the Paladin has a barrel which is 39 calibers long, the German Panzerhaubitze_2000 has a barrel which is 51.6 calibers.
I am certain that there are trade-offs, but in general a longer barrel means higher velocity and greater range.
Bull’s range improvements came at a huge loss of accuracy. As in “oops, dropped a shell on our guys” loss of accuracy.
>I don’t think the Stug had an 88 though. I think it was a variant of the Panther’s 75mm
Correct, but it was much more effective than the 88 due to it’s mobility.
>Of course, the German 88’s were still ripping up US tanks late in the war on the east side of the Rhine in 1945.
Depended a lot of the quality of the commander. Good generals always provided infantry support for the tanks and 88 where too big and immobile to resist infantry attacks. Patton’s forces in particular had no issues with them. Montgomery on the other hand got his armored spearhead shreaded during operation Goodwood because he didn’t provide any infantry support. The 88s where firing from concealed positions on both flanks.
Hans von Luck wrote book about his experiences during the war(fought on every major front) and he personally commanded the 88s at goodwood after his tanks where taken out by a massive air assault. I highly recommend his book.
>If we are ever in another ground war where hundreds or even thousands of guns are lobbing rounds at each other, our Air Force will have failed.
I keep hearing that SAMs are so advanced that neither side thinks that air forces will last longer than a week in a large war.
I love the stug. It’s very effective in my wargaming software.
Bull was working on increasing velocity, and on a very low budget. He was about a year from putting a projectile into orbit when the US pulled his funding to avoid the embarrassment of someone actually agenting to orbit on a shoestring before our very expensive rocket program.
There was no attempt to maintain accuracy, and he was working with a very poorly constructed gun. Read the HARP* final report. The gun was made by welding two naval rifles together end-to-end and stiffening the assembly with guy wires. A purpose built tube could have done much, much better.
And his sabots were made of plywood. Constructed in a carpentry shop. Now I know that a "sabot" was originally a wooden shoe, but this was a quick & dirty expedient. A sabot made of modern aerospace materials would have a lot more uniformity and better accuracy.
If he had not been murdered, I think his guns would have produce astonishing results.
* This HARP is not the same as Obama's refinance program with the same acronym. It stood for High Altitude Research Project.
It’s an OK article but typical narrow focus - probably written by some guy who makes fire extinguishing systems. The army and the Maines are stuck with the Fort Sill mentality: minimal budgets, labor-intensive firing and logistic systems, and solving precision issues with quarter-million-dollar-per-shot (and vulnerable) guided munitions.
The last big solution from Fort Sill was the 50 ton plus Crusader and they’ve been sulking ever since that pig was cancelled.
The future is highly mobile (fire on the move), very precise (advanced fire control, computer-controlled, MET-Sensing) ballistic systems with no gun crews. If the damn thing is hit and burns, you’ve only lost the machine.
The artillery gurus lost out when their existing systems were too heavy and too difficult to support in Afghanistan and the Iraq counterinsurgency. Now artillery is a backwater and the fossils are still teaching ancient history instead of current fire support.
It’s too bad the next war will be so fat paced that we won’t be able to teach new doctrine until it’s been over for a couple of years.
The first thing I noticed was how similar the chassis looks to the M 60 tank.
The Martlet projectiles that Dr. Bull used were both free flight and rocket-assisted and were fully instrumented. Not exactly the flimsy effort you have described!
I love all your posts. Planes! Tanks! Fighting ships! Cool stuff!
Just read your response a second time. Didn’t you know that the HARP barrel was reamed to be a smoothbore? There was never any reason to make system “accurate”: it was designed to fire almost vertically to attain the highest possible altitude, not to hit some target on the ground.
The HARP sent a 400 pound projectile to an altitude of 110 miles - hardly a Mickey Mouse operation!
The project was cancelled more because of friction between Canada and our government over Vietnam than by the insidious machinations of the Missile Lobby.
Reds the card of the man/ a knight without armor in a savage land’’.
Effectively, his factory straddled the US-Canadian border, and he simply moved "product" from one end to the other, before shipping...
His 155 artillery piece had increased range (maybe around 20%) and accuracy. Might have had to use his shell shape design, too.
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