Speaking of guns - WOW

[Greebe]

I saw a special report on PBS last weekend about that gun Doc, weighs 18lbs and it's air burst projectile is 20mm. Will take out personel in foxholes, within buildings etc with deadly accuracy

Whopping heavy thing to carry into battle, but awesomely effective

[MultimediaMan]

Maybe...the Greande is susceptible to ECM. BAAAD thing if it goes off only 50 meters from the barrel of the weapon.

They are also looking hard at a 40mm Variant...current 40MM grenades use nearly half of the warhead's volume for the fuze. The electronic fuze of the OICW would port nicely to the 40mm and the payload of the 40mm is much more useful.

SEFOP warheads depend on the diameter of the projectile..the larger the diameter, the better they work...a 20mm SEFOP warhead versus a Toyota Celica would result only in minor damage, whereas a 40mm will take down quite a few APCs in various armies' inventories.

[GT98]

Originally posted by Greebe
I saw a special report on PBS last weekend about that gun Doc, weighs 18lbs and it's air burst projectile is 20mm. Will take out personel in foxholes, within buildings etc with deadly accuracy

Whopping heavy thing to carry into battle, but awesomely effective

Supposed to cut the weight down to a more manageable 12 lbs

http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/oicw.htm

[Greebe]

Hmmm could you imagine if the likes of someone with my military background and electronics know how could do... detonate them unloaded... would be very messy
While I'm sure they're taking the upmost precations, doubt that they can cover all the bases.

/edit blasted keyboard

[RedRed]

Greebe

any thoughts on how you would prevent ECM from snafuing the round before it was fired?

without some electronic/radio emmission from the gun (which would obviously give away your position to counter attacks/weapons)?

wire fuses wouldnt help (its getting away from that tech - too heavy anyway...)

possibly some form of timer in the round to prime it after 1 second - but wouldnt that affect weight/etc?

I odnt know.....

[MultimediaMan]

The "timer" is interesting...it uses a revolution counter; since the spin of the projectile is more or less constant as applied by the rifling of the bore, it counts how many revolutions it must spin before detonating.

There is built-in logic that ensures the round has been fired, and has spun a certain amount of time before it can arm for detonation to be possible. The diagrams of the fuze I have seen have been of a fuze/timing logic consisting of 3-4 PCBs about 17 mm in diameter 2 mm thick, connected by a foil ribbon cable (Like on a CD Laser pickup). Not exactly hardened electronics. Granted, it is probably in a plastic/aluminum/steel body, but the fuze is armed and programmed via RF.

[Greebe]

It would have to have a programable key code to unlock and set a pre arm/charge stage. This would be only done once the projectile was loaded and presumably set to fire. Of course this is all wireless ie small pickup coil within the device which not just recieves the program signal but would also power the electronics for the programming/detonation stage ie to power it long enough to operate until discharged. Should only be neccessary for a couple of seconds... if it was a dud ie failed to detonate the device would also be rendered ineffective ie harmless once it's power charge was depleted.

I can think of a few ways of getting around these safeguards, but will not discuss. I refuse to feed information to potential terrorists.

[Wombat]

Yeah, it may have electronics in it, but they'd be foolish to completely ditch the advantage the physical world offers. A pin, or piece of insulator, or something that would take 1 fraction of a second to burn up once the shell is ejected, any of these to physically block the electrical signals required for detonation.