Just wondering...
 

I think someone here did some time in Sheridans...

The Shillelagh is IR-guided. So essentially it's a heat-seeker, I would think.

Could you shoot down a plane or helicopter with it? Can you even elevate the Sheridan's gun far enough? Does the Sheridan have that kind of fire control equipment?

The one I recall that was in Sheridans is Muns. Haven't seen him in a while. The other that was/is in love with Sheridans is Chalkline. Haven't seen him in awhile either. Chalk never was in the Sheridan but did a lot of research on them I think.

No no. The missile is guided by the gunner - it is SACLOS. Basically the gunner's reticule is paired to an IR-broadcasting remote control. Where the gunner points his reticule, the remote points. In the missile is an IR receiver that looks for the light being sent by the remote on the gunner's sight. So when the gunner moves the control stick left, a signal is beamed via the IR light to the missile that says "GO LEFT".

It's not a "heat-seeking" missile in the sense of an AIM-9 or the like. It relies solely on input from the gunner to hit its target. There's no seeker head in the MGM-151.

Now, could you shoot down a helicopter with the MGM151? Possibly. Assuming the helo in question was moving laterally, not using pop-up tactics, and no further than 10000ft away, then it is conceivable that you could shoot it down with a Shillelagh assuming the gunner could guide it all the way there. The maximum elevation for the M81E1 is 19.2 degrees, so you might bag an unwary low-flying helo in that envelope.

As for a fixed-wing aircraft? No way. Not enough range, not enough maneuverability, wrong kind of warhead (the M151 is fitted with a detonate-on-contact HEAT round that has to smack into a hard surface (armor or walls) nose-first to blow up - SAMs have blast/fragmentation warheads that blow up tens of feet away from target a/c but shower them with explosive rods or pellets, like a huge shotgun blast).

Tangentially, I have an old TSR wargame here called Tractics which is skirmish-scale infantry and armor (and aircraft) combat rules. Mostly it's concerned with WWII era (and Korean) but as it was published in 1973 there is a section for "modern" weapons including both the M60A2 and the Sheridan and I'm not sure why but someone decided that the Sheridan was nuclear capable - per the rules its main gun can fire a nuclear artillery shell!

I think that mistake probably stems from the fact that there is (or was) a nuclear 155mm shell which had a W48 warhead. The M81E1 (the Sheridan's main gun) was a 152mm gun, so perhaps Dave Megarry or Gary Gygax made the assumption that there was an extant nuclear shell for it, too...

I am sure that the shades of former Sheridan tankers are GRATEFULL there was no nuke ability. Max range on the Mgm-51 was 2000 yards. To borrow from Heinlein's Starship Troopers, "No one wants to be bunkmates with a cosmic calamity"

My $0.02

Mike

I think the nuclear capability (in the game) was for the actual main gun. However, even that only has a range of a few kilometers itself so, yeah.