[OT] Vorpal Chinook

[Tegyrius]

So I knew the Army had a drug problem in the seventies...

For your amusement (hysteria) (terror), here's a study on the feasibility of mounting two 105mm howitzers on a CH-47. I don't even know what you'd designate the resulting monstrosity. AH-47? MACH-47?

http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=AD0750150

(I'd attach it but it's a 10 MB scan of the original document. And archived at a .mil address, so presumably not a prank...)

- C.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

Howitzers... on a helicopter.
With autoloading.


Wow, just wow.

[rcaf_777]

Was this the ACH-47A Chinook - GUNS A-GO-GO that they came up with in Vietnam?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_CH-47_Chinook

[Tegyrius]

Nope. There were four ACH-47s all told, three of which were lost during the course of the experiment. This appears to have come along a few years later.

- C.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

The ACH-47A Chinooks had 2 stub-wing mounted 20mm cannon as well as 1 nose mounted 40mm grendade launcher and 2 x 70mm FFAR pod or 2 x 7.62mm Minigun pod under the wings. Secondary armament was typically 5 x M60 or 5 x M2 machine guns (or a mix of both) to give all around fire.
There's a decent page here about the Guns A Go-Go ships here
http://aviationtrivia.blogspot.com.au/2011/02/one-powerful-helicopter-gunship-ach-47a.html
and here
http://www.aviastar.org/helicopters_eng/bvertol_armoredchinook.php

The document Tegyrius found deals however with mounting auto-loading, soft-recoiling, 105mm howitzers on the stub-wings at the front of the aircraft.
And "Damn!" those people sure didn't seem to mind just how outlandish that sounds.
The concept could be an outgrowth of the early ideas of arming the CH-47 because as the first website listed above mentions, many ideas were examined. The 'Guns A Go-Go' ships were developed in the mid 1960s and ceased operations by 1968. This concept dates from 1972, the time when the Allied forces in Vietnam were pulling out of the country but a time when the ACH-47 was still fresh in memory and while the AH-1 was in operational use by then, it didn't carry the kind of firepower the ACH-47 could!