Long Range Artillery

M777 Lightweight Howitzer

Six inch, light weight howitzer can hurl a bullet 22 miles. Well, not exactly. Notice the extreme elevation of the barrel. What it does is hurl the bullet five miles into the air where it deploys its wings and then glides toward its target, where upon it takes a nose dive. "Lightweight" means it is light enough to be carried by a helicopter. Some parts of it had to be made from titanium in order to make it that light. The "wings" are kind of stubby.

Excalibur Guided Artillery Shell

This "gliding" is more like a guy in a wing suit than a sailplane. Even though it looks like it should fall like a rock, it still manages to travel at least 4 miles horizontally for every mile it falls. Since those little bitty wings are not going to do much to keep it from falling, it must have considerable horizontal velocity. With the extreme elevation of the gun, it is not going to get much horizontal velocity from being fired, which means that on the way up, the wings are going to have to alter it's trajectory from near vertical to horizontal.
     It has a guidance system that makes it very accurate, which means that if you know where your target is, you don't have to fire more than one shot to hit it. The Marines love this shell so much they ordered a thousand of the things at something like $85,000 each.

Thanks to Scott.

Update April 2015: Replaced the picture of the howitzer on account of the web site it came from lost it.