GPS Guided Artillery
 

This is pretty neat. No more artillery barrages and firing for effect. Just fire one round, or two for overkill...

GPS-Guided Shell Deploys

The Excalibur, a first-of-its-kind Global Positioning System- (GPS-) guided artillery shell, is on its way to Kuwait for deployment in Iraq, according to U.S. Army officials with the Picatinny Arsenal, N.J. Under development for eight years by Raytheon and three years by Raytheon and BAE Systems, Excalibur will be deployed after official results from recent final-stage testing.

In a late November U.S. Army test at Yuma Proving Ground, Ariz., 13 of 14 Excalibur rounds fired up to 24 kilometers away hit within 10 meters of their targets — an unprecedented circular error probable (CEP) for cannon artillery, Raytheon program official Everett Tackett said here at the Association of the United States Army’s Institute of Land Warfare Winter Symposium. Conventional artillery has a CEP of about 70 to 100 meters at 10 kilometers, 200 to 300 meters at 30 kilometers.

Tackett said the shells were fired from gun barrels pointed as much as 15 degrees away from the target, testing their ability to steer themselves in flight. “The rounds totally changed course, adjusting their ballistic trajectory toward the target,” he said.

The Army will fire Excalibur Block 1a-1 rounds from its 155mm howitzer and the new XM 777 lightweight 155mm howitzer, which was first fielded in October with the Army’s 2nd Battalion, 11th Field Artillery at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii.

“I don’t know of any land-based system that has comparable capability,” said retired Army Gen. William Nash, who commanded troops in Iraq, Bosnia and Kosovo, and is now a Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow.

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And coming next - Guided Bullets - piezoelectric actuators built into the round, the bullet goes where the guidance tells it, even around corners...

ORAC,

I find this very difficult believe, surely nobody is really called Everett Tacket. That must be a made up name.

I remember seeing a program about this on Discovery a while back where they conducted a test with it. Good to see it's finally making it into action.

Impressive bit of kit but I remember it being damn expensive to shoot! I wonder if they have managed to scale back the costs much.

All this assumes that the target grid is accurate in the first place. :uhoh:

That'd hardly be a drama in this day and age of satellite pictures and the world rendered into digital databases, would it?

Tell that to a certain Chinese(I think) embassy in the Balkans. Anyway the average customer for an artillery mission is a grunt on the ground getting shot at, who may only have a paper map to work out his grid and thence the enemy's, and who amy, in all the excitement, get a number or two transposed.

One problem may be in the co-ordinates. I've had a problem on drop zones - with American details in deg.min.sec and us in deg.min.dec. That sort of transposition over 10s of km would give a huge error.

Yeah, yeah, and you have to using the same geodetic datum etc. But assuming no one cocks up, the artillery now have a PGM putting them on equal terms with airdropped PGMs...

You need an awful lot of shells to match a 1000lb er.

From what I have read, 10 m is quite inaccurate compared with a cruise or a PGM. True it is 10-30 times more accurate than before but a miss is still a miss against some targets.

And what if it fails to guide? Because it is reliant on ballistics it is probably more likely to misguide short, left or right than long. Could therefore be limited in the gunfire support role.

Having recently experienced just how good the guys can be on the ground, this can only be another 'feather in their proverbial cap.' For those who have not operated within metres of a 105 gun barrage, you need to stop bashing the 'grunts' as the JTACs who call for fire are extremely professional.

Besides, who uses a 1000lb bomb these days... straight to the 2000lb MOAB to do the job, boy does that look good on goggs:\

SIA

... and this comes from a crab!

yes since world war 1 artillery has used a global positioning system usually refered to as a map and compass.

Yes it does take a few more shells to match the explosive weight of a 1000 lber but a battery can sit all day and provide almost continuious support when a jet fly's by drops its pay load and disappears back to base.

quote: Yes it does take a few more shells to match the explosive weight of a 1000 lber but a battery can sit all day and provide almost continuious support when a jet fly's by drops its pay load and disappears back to base.

However, we then put more bombs on and send the nice ocifer away again and again untila) we run out of bombs or b) they stop coming back.;)

First post on the thread I said, "...and coming next - Guided Bullets".

It would seem they're coming a bit sooner than I thought - though not using the piezo-electric guidance. Now, how long to apply the technology to an aircraft cannon and fire-control system.....

ATK Developing Anti-Rocket Bullet

Within two years, Alliant TechSystems (ATK) intends to test-fire a 50mm bullet that can correct its course to hit incoming rockets and mortar rounds.
The bullet will carry a directional thruster, which will be controlled via radio signals from a nearby radar tracking the incoming fire.

“As the round is flying forward, we’re tracking the round and the incoming threat with radar. The communication link will course correct the round and tell it when to fire a thruster to put it back on course to ensure it will intercept the incoming target,” said ATK business development manager Eric Axelson.

The 2 inches in diameter bullet is part of the U.S. Army’s Extended Area Protection & Survivability (EAPS) program, which also includes the radar, fire-control computer, and gun.

The bullet is steered by a solid-fuel rocket embedded in the cone of the projectile, being co-developed by ATK and the U.S. Army Armament, Research, Development and Engineering Center,said ATK spokesman Bryce Hallowell.

“The thruster has a very very rapid millisecond-type burn that is a one-time course correction for the projectile. There is a lot of guidance capability that is embedded into that technology,” Hallowell said.

ATK will testfire the bullet from a Bushmaster gun variant.......

Cant see the point in it really. Its hardly bombardment. One shell? No fun in that.

Same with naval gunfire support. A single 4.5 may be more accurate but I bet 9 16s was more impressive.

Exactly. Let the lead rain down.

Read a book once. My geography wasn't that good then but it was a good read. About an army unit stuck in Normandy. From the word picture they were spread along a road with the boccage protecting them from fire and view across a field. I have in mind rising ground to a wood bordering the other side.

They were stuck.

A NGSO suddenly appeared, dropped into the ditch and asked nonchanantly, as only the RN could, did they want some assistance.

Yes.

A quick RT followed and a minute later an express train roared overhead as the Rodney fired a broadside into the wood. The ground shook and the problem went away.

In the modern vernacular, job done. 9 2500lbs shells was just the job.

DefenseNews: U.S. Army Tests Guided Tank Rounds

When the U.S. Army fires a precision munition, it generally comes from a helicopter, a rocket or missile system, or even field artillery. But if the Mid-Range Munition program stays on track, tank crews will have guided shells of their own after 2012, Army officials say.

Army officials at Picatinny Arsenal, N.J., are testing one shell by ATK and one by Raytheon and General Dynamics in an effort to field a 120mm munition that can hit enemy targets — with or without much human help. Both appear to have met requirements thus far, said U.S. Army Col. Charles Bush, who runs the Army’s Future Force Division....

Launched in 2002, the Mid-Range Munition program has spent about $108 million so far, said Mark Young, science and technology manager, Line-of-Sight/Beyond Line-of-Sight Munitions Division, Picatinny Arsenal. They expect to release a request for proposals later in April to kick off a 63-month system design-and-development phase, to be followed by initial production around 2012. The rounds are intended to arm the Future Combat System’s Mounted Combat System vehicle when the FCS vehicles are fielded in 2015, Bush said.

The Raytheon-General Dynamics (GD) round, which is tipped with an explosive warhead and guided by small fins, carries two kinds of sensors.

A 3-inch infrared camera takes snapshots of the view ahead 30 times a second, sending the blocks of pixels to a computer that finds edges and shapes. The computer can pick out not just tanks, trucks or buildings, but their most vulnerable points. “We can look for the barrel and other features on the tank, accurately aiming the round to a soft part of the tank to penetrate easier,” said Raytheon program manager Rick Williams.

The round also carries a laser detector to spot reflected light from a designator carried by hand or slung under an unmanned aerial vehicle or aircraft. The two sensors can also act together to defeat modern laser countermeasures.

“Most modern tanks have a laser warning system, so whenever a laser hits, they pop smoke that prevents infrared imaging and lasers from penetrating,” said Raytheon spokesman Everett Tackett. But the Raytheon shell can follow a laser that is pointed near — but not directly at — the target. As the shell falls toward the laser spot, it checks the infrared picture up ahead and steers toward the nearest thing that resembles a tank....

On March 1, a test shell flew more than three miles and hit a T-72 tank at Yuma Proving Grounds, Ariz., Williams said.....

The other round is made by ATK. It too has a dual-mode seeker, but in place of the infrared camera, it mounts a millimeter-wave radar engineered to see through smoke, clouds and fog, said Dave Wise, general manager of ATK’s advanced weapons division.....

PN
 

The ground shook and the problem went away

Sounds a bit like a big girl I used to know!

Jack

Nice bit of kit - until the other side gets one of these or these