Fridays GIFs, 'Merica edition

frick yeah

quote:

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You know what's kinda sad; my buddy was a Marine officer in Afghanistan and commanded one of these artillery batteries. He said it was extremely rare for them to be allowed to use the guns to support troops in combat because even though they're pretty accurate, they're still "dumb" ordnance and have a higher than acceptable chance of collateral damage; eg a Marine calls in the wrong coordinates and hits a civilian hut.

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Not unless you're shooting Excalibur brotha. The USMC shot more of that round than the Army. There's a great story where they shot a linear sheath with rounds several hundred meters apart to clear IED's on the route. The Excalibur round, once it hits the apex of its trajectory, goes into "glide mode" where it deploys its fins and flies itself in a flat mode until it reaches the target coordinates, then attacks top down. Max range for a standard M107 HE 155mm round is 30K. Excalibur will push out over 40K and sometimes even further. Pretty bad arse round.



The M777 is a fantastic gun and cool to see it firing a high MACs charge. You can see the trails displace during the recoil. On the old systems, i.e. M198 155mm towed, that sort of displacement would require the gunner and chief of section to re-verify the lay of the howitzer with the collimeter. Now that the 777 has onboard GPS (dynamic reference unit or DRU or something similar, I'm not a towed guy, I'm a self-propelled gun bunny) with the Automated Fire Control System, the displacement calculation is instantaneous.

Tree cutting gif. Is the GOAT