Post by Lt Colonel Bruce Reynolds on Jul 28, 2010 2:52:32 GMT 12.75
GUNS........ THE Warthog]
First there was this gun...
It was developed by General Electric, the "We bring good things to life" people.
It's one of the modern-day Gatling guns. It shoots very big bullets. It shoots them
very quickly.
Someone said, "Let's put it in an airplane."
Someone else said, "Better still, let's build an airplane around it."
So they did. And "they" were the Fairchild-Republic airplane people.
And they had done such a good job with an airplane they developed back in WWII...
...called the P-47 Thunderbolt, they decided to call it the A 10 Thunderbolt.
They made it so it was very good at flying low and slow and shooting things with that fabulous gun.
But since it did fly low and slow, they made it bulletproof, or almost so. A lot of bad guys have found
you can shoot an A 10 with anything from a pistol to a 23 mm Soviet cannon and it just keeps on flying
and shooting.
When they got through, it looked like this...
It's not sleek and sexy like an F 18 or the stealthy Raptors and such, but I think it's such a great airplane because it
does what it does better than any other plane in the world.
It kills tanks.
Not only tanks, as Saddam Hussein's boys found out to their horror, but armored personnel carriers, radar stations,
locomotives, bunkers, fuel depots...just about anything the bad guys thought was bulletproof turned out to be easy
pickings for this beast.
See those engines. One of them alone will fly this puppy. The pilot sits in a very thick titanium alloy "bathtub."
That's typical of the design.
They were smart enough to make every part the same whether mounted on the left side or right side of the plane,
like landing gear, for instance.
Because the engines are mounted so high (away from ground debris) and the landing gear uses such low pressure
tires, it can operate from a damaged airport, interstate highway, plowed field, or dirt road.
Everything is redundant. They have two of almost everything. Sometimes they have three of something. Like flight
controls. There's triple redundancy of those, and even if there is a total failure of the double hydraulic system, there
is a set of manual flying controls.
Capt. Kim Campbell sustained this damage over Baghdad and flew for another hour before returning to base.
But about that gun...
It's so hard to grasp just how powerful it is.
This is the closest I could find to showing you just what this cartridge is all about. What the guy is
holding is NOT the 30 mm round, but a "little" .50 Browing machine gun round and the 20 mm cannon
round which has been around for a long time.
The 30 mm is MUCH bigger.
Down at the bottom are the .50 BMG and 20 x 102 Vulcan the fellow was holding. A t the bottom right is the bad boy
we're discussing.
Let's get some perspective here: The .223 Rem (M 16 rifle round) is fast. It shoots a 55 or so grain bullet at about
3300 feet/sec, give or take. It's the fastest of all those rounds shown (except one). When you move up to the .30 caliber
rounds, the bullets jump up in weight to 160-200 grains. Speeds run from about 2600 to 3000 fps or so.
The .338 Lapua is the king of the sniper rifles these days and shoots a 350 grain bullet at 2800 fps or so. They kill bad
guys at over a mile with that one.
The .50 BMG is really big. Mike Beasley has one on his desk. Everyone who picks it up thinks it's some sort of fake,
unless they know big ammo. It's really huge with a bullet that weighs 750 grains and goes as fast the Lapua.
I don't have data on the Vulcan, but hang on to your hat.
The bullet for the 30 x 173 A venger has an aluminum jacket around a spent uranium core and weighs 6560 grains
(yes, over 100 times as heavy as the M 16 bullet, and flies through the air at 3500 fps (which is faster than the M 16 as well).
The gun shoots at a rate of 4200 rounds per minute. Yes, four thousand. Pilots typically shoot either one- or two-second
burst which set loose 70 to 150 rounds. The system is optimized for shooting at 4,000 feet.
OK, the best for last.
You've got a pretty good idea of how big that cartridge is, but I'll bet you're like me and you don't fully appreciate how big
the G A G A U-8 A venger really is.
Take a look...
Each of those seven barrels is 112" long. That's almost ten feet. The entire gun is 19-1/2 feet long.
Think how impressive it would look set up in your living room.
Oh, by the way, it doesn't eject the empty shells but runs them back into the storage drum. There's just so dang many
flying out, they felt it might damage the aircraft.
Like I said, this is a beautiful design.
I'm glad it's ours.
First there was this gun...
It was developed by General Electric, the "We bring good things to life" people.
It's one of the modern-day Gatling guns. It shoots very big bullets. It shoots them
very quickly.
Someone said, "Let's put it in an airplane."
Someone else said, "Better still, let's build an airplane around it."
So they did. And "they" were the Fairchild-Republic airplane people.
And they had done such a good job with an airplane they developed back in WWII...
...called the P-47 Thunderbolt, they decided to call it the A 10 Thunderbolt.
They made it so it was very good at flying low and slow and shooting things with that fabulous gun.
But since it did fly low and slow, they made it bulletproof, or almost so. A lot of bad guys have found
you can shoot an A 10 with anything from a pistol to a 23 mm Soviet cannon and it just keeps on flying
and shooting.
When they got through, it looked like this...
It's not sleek and sexy like an F 18 or the stealthy Raptors and such, but I think it's such a great airplane because it
does what it does better than any other plane in the world.
It kills tanks.
Not only tanks, as Saddam Hussein's boys found out to their horror, but armored personnel carriers, radar stations,
locomotives, bunkers, fuel depots...just about anything the bad guys thought was bulletproof turned out to be easy
pickings for this beast.
See those engines. One of them alone will fly this puppy. The pilot sits in a very thick titanium alloy "bathtub."
That's typical of the design.
They were smart enough to make every part the same whether mounted on the left side or right side of the plane,
like landing gear, for instance.
Because the engines are mounted so high (away from ground debris) and the landing gear uses such low pressure
tires, it can operate from a damaged airport, interstate highway, plowed field, or dirt road.
Everything is redundant. They have two of almost everything. Sometimes they have three of something. Like flight
controls. There's triple redundancy of those, and even if there is a total failure of the double hydraulic system, there
is a set of manual flying controls.
Capt. Kim Campbell sustained this damage over Baghdad and flew for another hour before returning to base.
But about that gun...
It's so hard to grasp just how powerful it is.
This is the closest I could find to showing you just what this cartridge is all about. What the guy is
holding is NOT the 30 mm round, but a "little" .50 Browing machine gun round and the 20 mm cannon
round which has been around for a long time.
The 30 mm is MUCH bigger.
Down at the bottom are the .50 BMG and 20 x 102 Vulcan the fellow was holding. A t the bottom right is the bad boy
we're discussing.
Let's get some perspective here: The .223 Rem (M 16 rifle round) is fast. It shoots a 55 or so grain bullet at about
3300 feet/sec, give or take. It's the fastest of all those rounds shown (except one). When you move up to the .30 caliber
rounds, the bullets jump up in weight to 160-200 grains. Speeds run from about 2600 to 3000 fps or so.
The .338 Lapua is the king of the sniper rifles these days and shoots a 350 grain bullet at 2800 fps or so. They kill bad
guys at over a mile with that one.
The .50 BMG is really big. Mike Beasley has one on his desk. Everyone who picks it up thinks it's some sort of fake,
unless they know big ammo. It's really huge with a bullet that weighs 750 grains and goes as fast the Lapua.
I don't have data on the Vulcan, but hang on to your hat.
The bullet for the 30 x 173 A venger has an aluminum jacket around a spent uranium core and weighs 6560 grains
(yes, over 100 times as heavy as the M 16 bullet, and flies through the air at 3500 fps (which is faster than the M 16 as well).
The gun shoots at a rate of 4200 rounds per minute. Yes, four thousand. Pilots typically shoot either one- or two-second
burst which set loose 70 to 150 rounds. The system is optimized for shooting at 4,000 feet.
OK, the best for last.
You've got a pretty good idea of how big that cartridge is, but I'll bet you're like me and you don't fully appreciate how big
the G A G A U-8 A venger really is.
Take a look...
Each of those seven barrels is 112" long. That's almost ten feet. The entire gun is 19-1/2 feet long.
Think how impressive it would look set up in your living room.
Oh, by the way, it doesn't eject the empty shells but runs them back into the storage drum. There's just so dang many
flying out, they felt it might damage the aircraft.
Like I said, this is a beautiful design.
I'm glad it's ours.