Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Whoopee! Seeing eye tank shells
An Army Abrams 120mm cannon destroyed a T-72 tank more than 5,000 meters away using a next-generation guided tank round able to find its own way toward a target, service officials said.So we spend a fortune on a stable platform and all manner of external guidance and now this! How much will this cost per round? Probably too much to practice with live ammo.
The December test at Yuma Proving Grounds, Ariz., was staged to prove that the guidance system of the Mid Range Munition (MRM) would work when fired.
The MRM has two guidance modes.
The first is laser designation, in which the round follows a laser spot generated by some other target seeker to the target, or in so-called offset mode, near the target.
The second is with its 3-inch infrared camera. The guidance system compares the IR images to a target library stored in electronic form.
“The algorithm running through the round is looking at the environment and differentiating the target from items that might be in range in a normal desert environment,” said Jeff McNaboe, Army MRM program manager.
Comments:
<< Home
This reminds me of the Soviet/Russian experiments with firing ATGM's out of tank barrels. The AT-11 (9m119) is still a standard issue in the Russian Army, it is a 125mm laser-guided ATGM that fires from the main gun of a T-72 or derivatives.
Yet another case of where the US is trying to catch up with a Soviet innovation in tank warfare... sort of like how the T-34 taught the US how to design a usable tank (not that the US really heeded that lesson until the M1 design, the Patton and Patton-derived tanks that preceded the Abrams were woefully inferior to Soviet designs of the same era).
- Badtux the Tank Penguin
Yet another case of where the US is trying to catch up with a Soviet innovation in tank warfare... sort of like how the T-34 taught the US how to design a usable tank (not that the US really heeded that lesson until the M1 design, the Patton and Patton-derived tanks that preceded the Abrams were woefully inferior to Soviet designs of the same era).
- Badtux the Tank Penguin
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]
Post a Comment