Posted on 02/27/2020 6:03:03 AM PST by C19fan
Leaked images of the U.S. Army’s new super gun have emerged on social media, showing for the first time the mysterious new weapon with a claimed range of over 1,000 miles. The Strategic Long Range Cannon (SLRC) is designed to be transported by truck, handled by a crew of eight, and rain shells down on enemy positions across continents and oceans.
(Excerpt) Read more at popularmechanics.com ...
Absent quality terminal guidance, it would be remarkably inaccurate.
Unless the projectile is rocket propelled, I cant see how a tube that short could possibly accelerate a mass sufficient to send it out 1000 miles.
Need my bs meter.
If you read the article, it assumes a guided, self-propelled projectile.
Of course, the round for extreme ranges will include additional propulsion and terminal guidance. A prototype munition exists but I do not know if it has been fired.
BTW, the first picture in Popular Mechanics is a display piece at Ft. Sill, OK. 1950’s era weapon.
Can’t help but notice that the tweet is from a Chinese source. What is up with that?
They couldn’t see the cave openings. The new guns would not have helped.
The article provides a possible explanation.
I want one of those...but probably won’t fit in the garage.
And then there’s the homeowner’s association.
Strategic implied something that blows up real good.
Put several of these on a ship and you could change the classic definition of a battleship. I can imagine a three gun battery, 2 forward and 2 aft (total of 12 guns), each with a fire arc of roughly +/- 100 degrees or so from centerline.
Depending on the fire rate, that configuration could drop a whole lot of ordnance on a very small target. And a Battleship could carry a WHOLE lot of rounds.
As a combined arms force, this would also be interesting in an aircraft for theater level ground support.
I suspect that there will need to be a whole lot better fire direction control between services. Down to the point where a Army forward observer (or drone operator or satellite image interpreter) could call on all three services to pound a target.
Yeah, I didn’t read the article, actually.
;-)
Why bother using an artillery tube? Unless the exotic munition can be fired from an already-fielded cannon.
Anyways, it sounds like a science project t.
“It shoots through schools!”
Artillery has been neglected during the long war, but I’m not sure that this approach will fix it. Imagine moving this cannon through a Polish village on a cold, dark night.
Scramjets do not provide the distance this claims. The only thing I have seen field tests of which does is electromagnetic propulsion, aka railguns.
Artillery is incredible accurate and dropping a full sized 152mm shell (no explosives, just a chunk of metal that size) on top of anything from that distance and height of trajectory would be an event, especially to those in the area.
“Penetrates and disintegrates enemy A2(AntiAccess)/Area Denial defenses” (as in China’s strategy in the South China Sea).
Check.
Combine this with some of the new “sub-caliber” nuclear warheads that we are now developing, and maybe an innovative boost-glide hypersonic artillery shell. Then proliferate these tubes all around the South China Sea, and on all kinds of seagoing vessels.
Suddenly the Chinese “unsinkable aircraft carrier” artificial islands seem like much less of a survivable capability.
At fairly close range, don’t you think the guns would have basted new cave openings if aimed in the right general direction?
With gun ranges in the hundreds of miles though, the naval gunfire support mission becomes viable again. More broadly, hostile littorals become vulnerable to sustained US naval gunfire. Adversaries near the sea would find that airpower was not the only option against them, with expensive air defenses rendered inadequate to defend against sustained gunfire from the US Navy.
At close range the flame throwers worked better than artillery.
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