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Originally Posted by swaghauler
I also got to fire the first generation M136/AT4. The muzzle blast was ferocious and due to the flat trajectory, it could hit a target at 500 meters if you did your part. The one I fired had a 9mmP "marking cartridge" on the left top side of the launcher. You would fire the 9mm Tracer and if it hit the target, you fired the rocket IMMEDIATELY. I believe later M136 Launchers deleted the 9mmP Marking Rifle, but I'm not sure. I thought the M136 was too big and too heavy for an infantry weapon.
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I do not know about first generation AT4's but current production ones, are terrible weapons. Every time a unit would go to the life fire range we had to have an EOD team on standby so that when they called us because they had a "Dud" we could get the range open again quickly. It was not really that they have a high dud ratio, it is that they have so many safeties that they do not work well. Their was one AT-4 range that had been shut down for years we were training our company, each day we sent one team out to find and destroy as many AT-4 rockets as they could at the end of the week (seven teams) we destroyed well over 1000 "Dud" rockets.
Quote:
Originally Posted by swaghauler
I had the privilege to fire an RPG-7 on two separate occasions. The first time was a "battlefield capture" during Restore Hope. It was a Russian RPG-7 with the original Russian 2.7X optic (PGO?) on it. The rocket was a Russian PG7V HEAT warhead. It had quite a report as well. It sounded like a shotgun blast when you set it off. It was very accurate with the optic (it had windage and ranging STADIA in it). The launcher was also very reliable with its percussion ignition system. I liked that the warhead had a piezo-electric fuse that wouldn't allow the rocket to arm until the rocket motor ignited. The round had a "kicker charge" that shot the round out of the launcher to a range of about 11 meters before the motor engaged and the G-forces armed the fuse. The backblast reached up to 10 meters but the "kicker charge" was violent enough to blow off a limb up to 2 meters behind the launcher. You could burn the back of your legs if you angled the launcher more than 45 degrees upward.
The Second "RPG-7" I handled was during a trip to Iraq where I was providing protection to a local businessman who was doing business with the new Iraqi government. It was much cruder in construction and didn't even have any provision for an optic. It was armed with a captured Iranian "Najaf" round. This launcher had similar characteristics to the earlier RPG-7 but was not nearly as accurate. The "Najaf" round also scared the hell out of me because it had no safety or minimum arming distance. The officer (captain?) giving the demonstration said he had seen them explode when dropped. So much for "state of the art" Iranian hardware.
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I hate to break it to you, they probably just told you that to make you feel safe, but the Soviet ones do not have any safeties on them either, not in less you count the cardboard cover over the piezo as a safety. Most Soviet weapons have very few if any safeties.