Senior Member
|
Rotary Guns are generally a waste that admits to the inability of the weapons system to hit a fleeting target in the moment when muzzle and spatial volume coalign, 'in the future'.
This in turn can be stated as 'not how many rounds in a second but how many _accurate_ rounds in the first half or quarter second. Right now, nothing can match Metal Storm technologies for instantaneous ROF in a small package but revolvers are generally more weight and OML conscientious for stealt platforms in particular.
Having a huge mass penalty, Rotaries are in fact slow to spin up in the first 1/2 second where a single barrel Revolver gun will beat them off the blocks and they eat ammo at /enormous/ rates, requiring powered feeds in all the larger applications.
Relative to the number of targets that can actually be serviced in the time a vehicle or human can slew them, they are a 'water the garden with fire hose' solution.
On a mixed battlefield they are also an incredible hazard to own troops (with the number of rounds richoetting off in all directions) while even fighter aircraft have to be careful about strafing under some conditions of recent weather activity because it is quite possible to strafe your own aircraft out of the sky if you hit a puddle.
They have some uses, such as missile and now mortar defense. And operation under a low threat ceiling (heavy radar based defenses not exceedable or suppressable by standoff and special mission weapons, where the A-10 and the GAU-8 come in). But these are now falling to the wayside in the face of lasers (faster steering, greater maximum range) and stealth + glide munitions.
Indeed, even for CAS, the gun failed the moment the rocket became guided and/or the cost of the aircraft it was mounted in exceeded 10 million dollars. The latter happened sometime in the early 80s with the F-5E/F-20.
The former is a more recent occurence with the APKWS and LCPK guidance systems acting as plug'n'play addaptors ahead of the warhead section and behind the fuze in the truest tradition of KMU smart weapons design.
Yet with a modern gun like the BK.27 or the GAU-12 or the Mk.44 you can typically fire a 3-10 round burst and get good hits as much as a mile and a half (8,000ft slant range) using just the IFFC capabilities of the aircrafts automated flight and targeting systems. The F-15A in fact accomplished the first 'hands off' FQ gunkill back in the mid 1980s with a system calld FireFly III that utilized an ATLIS pod and modified software tovastly exceed what a pilot could match with the existing M61A1 (6,000ft opening fire, target dead by 4,500ft).
But as an illustrative comparison, with a CRV-7 motor (4,400fps vs. 3,600fps for the PGU-28) RAF Jaguars were firing through the threat floor on targets between 6 and 8 thousand METERS away.
With modern day SRMs effectively Min-R'd only to the fuzing safety on flyout, air to air gunnery with conventional guns is as dead as the dodo.
But in ground attack the big advantage of standoff plus multiple shots is that not only can you now guide a single 10-17lb warhead to a precise aimpoint (urban collateralled target) that a targeting pod can see but a bullet never reach. But you can also get guaranteed engagements with a grenadelet or multidart munition which will kill _area targets_ from distances well beyond MANPAD threats. And in numbers (LAU-151=7 shots for 500lbs, 2 pods @ 1,000lbs = 14 engagements X 9 grenadelets = 126 possible distributed point targets hit) vastly exceeding what even the largest ammo drum (2,000rds on the A-7 and F-111) can match with the M61A1.
CONCLUSION:
The gun is dead people. The Army still uses it because Key West restricts them from flying high and/or fast enough to make superior weapons options worthwhile. And they have lost around 112 aircraft (X20 million each = 224 million dollars) for their troubles. Everyone else has long since figured out that gunfights with a guy on the ground who has no place to go and often a bigger muzzle _and friends_ is just not the way to keep your LER numbers out of the red.
CJ
P.S. The F-35 does not use the Vulcan. It uses the GAU-22, itself a modified GAU-12/U. Four barrels, 25mm. The Army has given up on the 25mm round, finding it needs 30mm to defeat BMP-3/4 and with the passing of the GAU-12 from the AC-130U fleet, this leaves only the Marines as an active user of the 25mm caliber. Given the F-35 itself and certainly 980lb gun pod are also mistakes, this leaves the entire mission concept of the rotary gun as a air platform weapons system under severe doubt.
|
