Quote:
Originally Posted by Vespers War
All of the DIVAD entrants were based on the M48 hull (it was a proposal requirement), so that might have been a problem regardless of who won. I say might because I'm not sure the other entrants added as much weight as the M247 did (17 tons heavier than a normal M48). The Gepard's turret only adds 5 tonnes to a Leopard 1, and the driver trainer version of the Leopard 1 uses an 8.5 tonne weight to compensate for the lack of a turret. I don't know for sure what the M48's turret weight was, but I'm guessing around 3 tons since I've seen claims the M247 turret was 20 tons and it added 17 tons to the vehicle's weight. If the Gepard turret was 13.5 tonnes, that would make it approximately 15 tons, so it would add 12 tons to vehicle weight. It's certainly not a lightweight, but shaving 5 tons off the mass the M48's expected to haul around should help at least somewhat with the speed issue.
However, the M247 had plenty of other problems:
Electronics failures if it was wet
Hydraulic leaks if it was cold
Radar tracking degraded if it was warm
Too slow to engage (10-11s against hovering helicopters, 11-19s against moving targets, when the requirement was to engage within 8s)
Turret too slow to track fast targets
Lack of radar discrimination against ground clutter (most famously locking onto a latrine fan because the moving blades distracted it)
At high angles the gun barrels blocked the radar
Easily jammed
Gun range was half the range of the missiles carried by the helicopters it was supposed to engage
The range issue isn't really the design's fault, it's a failure of the requester to anticipate future technologies, but the development of longer-ranged anti-tank helicopter missiles meant that even if development had gone perfectly the utility of the design would have plummeted. It would still be useful against anything that blundered into its range, but the vehicles it was supposed to protect (not to mention the M247 itself) could be destroyed by a helicopter from well outside its own engagement range if it spotted them first. That range issue was why the Army shifted to missile-based AA for its next attempt at a fill-in-the-gap air defense vehicle (which turned out to be ADATS).
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I do not remember where I found it, and will have to see if I can find it again, but I found an article written by a USAF pilot who was part of the testing of the SGt York. Not saying that it did not have issues (lots and lots of them), but from his prospective it worked, every time he tired to "attack" it shot him down, if I remember right it was 100% effective in the tests that he was part of. Could they have ever made it really work? I do not think so, as to much was stacked against it from the get go, but in a TW2000 type world I could see maybe making some and saying what the heck it is better than nothing.