Caption of the Day

U.S. Soldiers using the Enhanced Portable Inductive Artillery Fuze Setter on an XM1156

And that's after I cut it down to the bare essentials. A giant corporation developed a 'smart' fuze for conventional artillery shells that greatly improves their accuracy. It is not as accurate as purpose designed 'smart' shells, but it doesn't cost as much either. The big advantage is that it can be used with existing 'dumb' artillery shells, and we have a gazillion of those stored away in secret warehouses. Probably next door to the Sinaloa cartel's cocaine warehouses.

Other posts about smart weapons here.

Via Bayou Renaissance Man

Kamikaze Drone

KUB-BLA - a new high-precision unmanned attack complex
defenseupdate
Could drones replace artillery? Shell fired from cannons travel much faster, but their range is limited to a couple dozen miles at most. Also, you need a cannon to fire those shells, and cannons are big, heavy, expensive, precision machines. This thing needs a slingshot, something most any backyard mechanic could put together. The drone is much more complex than a dumb artillery shell, but not as complicated as some. Since the technology that goes into drones has become commonplace, the drone itself could be put together by the same backyard mechanic.

Google translation of the YouTube blurb:

Read more at http://rusvesna.su/
At the International Exhibition of Arms and Military Equipment IDEX-2019 in Abu Dhabi, the Kalashnikov concern presented a new intelligent weapon - the high-precision unmanned aerial system KUB-BLA.
This is stated in the press service of Rostec State Corporation, the structure of which includes Kalashnikov.
UB-UAV "is designed to destroy remote ground targets. An unmanned aerial vehicle delivers a special load on the coordinates of the target, which are set manually or in the image from the target load of guidance. This complex is a step towards a completely new combat operations. We confidently keep in the forefront among the countries-producers of such weapons,” said Rostekh CEO Sergey Chemezov.
High-precision unmanned projectile flies up to 30 minutes at a speed of 130 km per hour. The charge on this complex is delivered to the target, regardless of its secrecy and terrain, both at small and at high altitudes. This is a very accurate and most effective weapon that is very difficult to fight with using traditional air defense systems.

I'm wondering it we ought to require all drones to be registered, or at least require them to carry a radio transponder with an ID so the owner can be tracked down. License plates serve the same function on cars. More importantly, we also need a fleet of copper drones to take down any drones that trespass into airliner airspace.

Via Say Uncle

Update August 2024 replaced missing video with a different video about the same drone.

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.

Bonus 155

Roberta grumbles about an ad, which prompts me to do a little digging, and I fall down the rabbit hole into Terminator-smart weapons land. The ad uses a clip of an attack on a military vehicle using some new kind of bomb. Evidently this new bomb is replacing the IED's (Improvised Explosive Device - the road side bombs being employed by the insurgents/jackasses/criminals in Iraq against US troops). I saw the ad before, but I didn't think much about it, but then I have my own hot buttons. But hearing from Roberta prompted me to find out just what this guy is talking about: all I heard was mumble. So. EFP: Explosively Formed Projectile, a nasty anti-armor munition. Poking around I found this video about a really fancy, really complicated anti-tank howitzer shell.


Your tax dollars at work. Each shell costs $40,000. I suppose if you are facing a tank, that might be considered a good deal. If you are a hardened bean counter, it's also pretty good economics. A new US Abrams tanks goes for about $4 million, a good used Russian tank can be had for a mere $100 grand.

But would it really be effective? I can see several possible problems:

• Can you hit a moving target? The Bonus 155 can scan a circular area 200 yards in diameter, (i.e. a target area of 32,000 square meters). The cannon that fires this shell has a range of 20 miles. Gunners have artillery down to a science, so I imagine they could probably put a shell within a hundred yards of their target if it wasn't moving. 20 miles is a long way, and even a bullet is going to take a couple of seconds (36 according to the video) to get there. If the tank is moving, you are going to have to predict it's new location or the shell is not going to be able to "see" it.
• Target identification. The Bonus will only fire it it identifies a target. What if it doesn't identify a target? Does it just fall to the ground and wait for the enemy to come pick it up and shoot it back at us?
• The Zulu war quartermaster problem: will they be able to deploy these shells in time to use them? I mean, they cost $40,000 a piece. I can just imagine the guy in charge of the armory being real persnickety about letting just any gunner pull a hundred shells from stock.
• The junkie stockroom clerk. Normally you need a BIG gun to shoot one of these shells, but each shell contains two mines that could be removed from the shell and triggered manually. I just see a stockroom clerk slipping these out the back door one at a time in order to get another fix.

As a bonus, I saw the camera they used to take a picture of the MOAB drop (right at the 3:33).