Quoted Text
The vehicle itself was sound. Look how long Sheridans without the guns soldiered on at the NTC. Putting one of those low pressure 76 or 90mm guns on it might have been one way to go. Making it sort of an American version of the Scorpion/Scimitar.
I agree completely-- I soldiered around in an M551 for almost two years-- when we stayed away from shooting off the big 152mm "artillery piece" mounted in the turret, they ran fine and were really kind of a blast to crew-- they were nimble and fast. But within hours of being on the firing line things would start to break-- the recoil was just too much for the chassis and drive train to handle. The missile had almost no recoil, but was $5000+ a pop, and at most we got to fire one a year, the rest of the time it was conventional rounds. In today's cruise missile era $5,000 sounds acceptable, but in 1976 dollars, it would be about the same as $25,000 is today per missile. As a new 2LT, I was making the princely sum of $635 a month in comparrison. Two years later I was collecting $790 a month as a 1LT, and I thought that was big bucks. How times have changed. I never broke over $1,000 a month until I was a senior Captain. So you can see the missile was really expensive as a weapon system goes. By today's standards, the IR/wire guided missile was really primitive, but it did a good job. I should have mentioned the missile firing sequence was 1) laser the target for exact range 2) lay in the launcher (gun tube) 3) fire the missile, which had an IR source on it, whose coded signal was received by a tracker box above the gun on the tank 4) the gunner then "flew" the missile to the target down a pair of micro-wires trailing behind the missile by keeping the cross hairs in his sight reticle on the target. The back-up was a coded IR signal the tank picked up from the missile and retransmitted as the missile flew down range. There were drawbacks though, if it rained just before target acquisition, the reflection of water on the ground could skew the sight picture, and the $5000 missile might ground itself right in front of the target. I've seen Troop commanders get royally chewed out by Squadron commanders for "wasting" a missile this way. To prevent this, gunners were told to keep the sight reticle at the top of the target, rather than dead center-- as it usually always resulted in a "hit". It was a pretty accurate system, as long as there was no fog, mist or heavy precipitation, and the gunner could see the target clearly, but there was no such thing as a "training missile" as there was for a conventional round (conventional "training" rounds are solid aluminum shot, and could be differentiated from the "real" rounds because they are painted bright blue--but you still don't want to get hit with a training round downrange though- they hit the target with the same kinetic energy as the real thing). The gunnner also had a "choke sight" which could be used to get the approximate range to target, if the laser was on the blink-- which it was quite frequently, so we trained both with and without the laser for conventional rounds--- but only fired a missile in training if the laser was working. Usually the most accurate crew at tank gunnery was chosen to fire a missile while the rest of the platoon watched. I was fortunate one annual tank gunnery in having an excellent gunner, so we got to fire a missile twice in two years!! Most crews didn't even get that.
VR, Russ
