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Originally Posted by Vespers War
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
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Again, the problem was the DIVADS was still at the developmental stage and the solution to get Captain Insane-o slew to cue, elevation and traverse, whiplash speeds was to replace the turret hydraulics w/ 5000 psi systems from aircraft. Of course then you're going to have to engineer the hydraulics to be field serviceable- doable. And then a ten or so years later people would develop some really cray cray brushless type drive motors.
Also note the APG-66 used by DIVADS was air cooled, again which was a first for a fighter which previous used liquid cooled often some sort CFC refrigerant pumped into a heat exchanger. W/ software and hardware hacks both the rotating bar and illuminator would have matured into something useable or at least everybody cognizant of limitations
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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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And that's the thing ADA as a branch not only ignored it own mantras but forgot about them. Gus and missiles are complementary and when you cancel one system (Roland) that was supposed to work w/ another DIVADS/Sgt York you aren't going to get coverage, engagement speeds, mobility, and/or number of systems per battalion.
Twilight 2k is about or should be about armies having both high and low tech systems at all levels because this was it. Nuclear war where a significant portion of homo sapiens was reduced to radioactive ash
Mad Mikec