http://www.vetsquad.com/Helicopter_Kills.mpeg

All I can say is: wow. No matter how many times you see this it never loses it's impact.

Anyone have any insight as to why there was that long a delay before firing commenced?

~J

The gunfire may have looked slightly more dramatic than it really was due to the thermal imaging. Is it possible that what look like explotions are actually just dust kicked-up by the high-caliber bullet? Having neverlooked through thermal goggles at gunfire I can't really say.

Those were low light goggles not thermal gogles and so yes what you saw was dust. Did anyone notice the round counter at the bottom right of center? That thing was firing 20 rnds per burst!

An object lesson in why you dont piss off someone with a 20mm cannon that can shoot you from a mile aaway and you dont even know they are there.

Unless they have changed NVG's in the last few years I would say that was thermal. NVG's put a green tint on everything.

As for the video...

An object lesson in why war is the last option.

Very impressive.

it was thermal. note that the engines on the trucks are warm. also, NVGs present a much higher-quality image. the fact that there are two speakers leads me to believe that this was shot in an Apache--pilots sometimes bring video recorders/cameras with them, and i know Apaches have IR cameras. the reason for the long delay between firing and impact is that the helicopter doing the shooting was a goodly distance away--far enough away that the targets don't even hear the sound of the chopper's engine. they also don't hear the sound of the weapon until a few seconds after the rounds impact, which is why you don't see them trying to get out of the way. if it was an Apache, that's a 30mm cannon that's being fired, and the rounds are--i believe--explosive.

if you listen to the pilots, the reason it took them so long to get shooting initially was that they had to switch from laser distancing to auto distancing. i'm not sure what auto distancing is--maybe determining range based on how far the camera is focusing? regardless, it was important because there's a computer that does their aiming for them (and you thought smartgoggles were sci-fi!); if its range information is wrong, it will shoot too low or too high.

It actually is IR. If you look to the upper left, you can see the "FLIR" designation. Also, people don't glow like that on image amplification. And the "dust" is also partially hot from the fine red mist of the first target, and the ricochets and sparking from the vehicles that were nearby as well.

http://www.atk.com/productsPrecision/descr...0mmChainGun.htm

I believe that the above was the offending weapon system, 30mm chaingun.

That was a bit grusome. Those poor guys seemed like they couldn't even tell where the rounds were coming from.

It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.
Robert E. Lee

Yeah, it was pretty clear that no one had any idea what was happening. The only one to have managed to do anything coherent was the guy who hid behind the truck.

~J

Then you see him rolling over and trying to crawl away...

Would that qualify as a snuff film? Dude that's gruesome. It's like watching a video game where you killing the baddies but freaking people are dying for real. That's one of the things I like about SR when someone dies it's not for real......War really is like a video game, that frightens me......I wonder if skynet is listening? Watching bunkers explode or is cool. Watching someone distentigrate kind of turns my stomach......And I voted Republican last election......uhhhh I need some beer.

On a side note I work with a guy who use to maintain the electronics on a apache. He was saying that when they fire the large caliber guns like that that they have to fire continuously or else they damage the internal mechanisms. Down in North Carolina they would "fix" some of the piolts who had a propensity for firing short bursts. They would load the amunition belts with a round every other bullet. None of the pilots caught on. After watching that clip I see why he's so against going into Iraq. We never actually see any one dying. When you see that sort thing in RL up front and personal war takes on a different dimension. I give those guys over there alot of respect, that's got to be something that haunts you till you die.

What you don't see you don't normally think about it. (Out of sight out of mind.) Just like the road to Bagdad....That bacame a death field. That sort of footage is ussually "edited". That can't be good.

I wonder if they develop these weapon systems with the idea that they want you to fire and forget. Being ordered to kill someone can never be easy. But pointing a cross hair on a red blip is alot easier than seeing someone's head explode. Snipers in Vietnam were close enough not only to see their prey but hear the noises they make when certain parts get "impacted". There's a guy I knew in the early 90's who will never leave Vietnam and can explain in detail what someone's head sounds like when it takes a round.

I would also guess from the way those rounds tore through the trucks that they were depleted uranium, but that's just a guess.

Given that they were ordinary trucks, they wouldn't have to be DU rounds. HMG round'd do just fine.

~J

That's no Heavy Machine Gun. I figure something like a .50 BMG is what sort of caliber a HMG has. For 30mm canons you're way into Autocanon territory by then.

I said that HMG rounds'd do fine, which they would. So would miniguns and MMG, probably. Autocannons'd have no need in the least for DU.

And yes, I did misidentify, but don't you love it when a flawed observation yields a correct conclusion?

~J

whatever it is they're using it almost looks like a dual mount system. i swear when they're taking out the first guy i see 2 bullet trails

If that was an Apache, then the cannon was 30mm, probably DU too. Nice of them to finish off that wounded guy.

they do, indeed. the Longbow upgrade, i believe, has an improved FLIR system. and that does look like the FLIR display on an Apache; however, i can't say for sure that the Little Bird doesn't use the same system. (it'd make sense if they did, but the US Army isn't really built around sense.)

i have to doubt those were DU rounds. we don't use them very often anymore.

In all honesty he probably wouldn't have lasted that long. At the end of Vietnam, it became logistically clear that it was more difficult for the enemy to take care of wounded than to burry the dead. Weapons development changed to make weapons that were better at mameing than out right killing. They're still finding explosives in Cambodia from unexploded cluster type bombs. The munitions fires off and carpets an area with small explosives spheres packed with explosives creating a mini claymore. Unexploded ordances are all over the place. Kids find them thnking the yellow spheres are toys and if they're lucky they just loose an arm or a leg.

So where was this video shot, and how recent is it?

Those are the second and third questions my girlfriend asked me as she looked over at the screen and saw the video playing. The first was why something like this would be on a game forum, which I wasn't able to answer.

You've got me all wrong, I wasn't offended at all. I just wasn't able to explain it to her in a satisfactory way, and now she thinks I'm a little weird for playing games that involve gory films of people being reduced to kibble.

The explosions are so large, the rounds are most likely M789 HEDP (and not kinetic energy penetrators, DU or any other kind). 21.5g shaped charge, claimed to be lethal up to 10ft and to penetrate 2" of armor steel.

If I had to guess, I'd say it's from Operation Allied Force or Noble Anvil, Kosovo '99. But that's not based on anything. Might as well be from the 1st Gulf War. Seems somewhat unlikely that it'd be from the 2nd one.

Area damage for Autocannons would make a lot of sense (as long as they're firing explosive shells), but that's pretty hard to do with the SR rules. For single shots it's not bad, but for autofire... Anyone got suggestions how to make it work without some sort of mathematical or dice-rolling nightmare?

Not familiar with military practice is it is depicted in that clip, why did they have to wait for movement to destroy the vehicles?

EDIT: Watched it again, I think I found out why. It seems they were making sure they killed all the people first before usingrounds on the vehicles, I guess they wanted to make sure the people were dead before using their limited ammo on vehicles.

could've been any number of reasons. at a guess, the reason was that the trucks weren't the primary target--the people were. they probably mentioned the trucks simply as reference points.

Nope, the gunner kept asking to kill the trucks, it seemed he was more interested in shooting them (with good reason, they are not people I would assume). The only time the trucks became a reference is when the wounded person was trying to make an escape, as best he could. The people were the obvious target, I was just wondering why the gunner kept waiting to see movement before shooting the cars.

http://www.hqmc.usmc.mil/factfile.nsf/
Saw a few of these up close and personal in the marines.

The hard thing to factor-in is how the scatter of the bullets on autofire would affect the area damage. I'm trying to get a system whereby the power of the area damage is increased by the standard 1/bullet fired rules but I can't get the area to behave how I want it. Also: If the recoil was not compensaed well, the spread would bewider but less powerful.

What area would you say the blast radius of the 20 round bursts in that video were?

T AUSTERE: For the blast radius, I simply chose the type of grenade I knew had the lower radius, but perhaps -4 per meter is more appropriate.

Also, you're right that all autocannons have a base D damage rating. But I think this should be viewed as being based on them having normal, large slug rounds that just sink into whatever they hit. IMO, being explosive should lower the base damage level (while the explosion istelf can potentially raise it) just as a balance mechanism.

If hand grenades and minigrenades are 10S, something like 6S-8S would probably be appropriate for the blast of an autocannon HE round. However, the person getting hit by one should still be getting the 18D (or 20D).

The 20-round bursts in the clip don't look like they'd be lethal to more than 5 meters away.

How would(/should, in your opinion) suppressive fire work with fully automatic weapons with a blast radius?

I'm pretty sure I know how it works IRL. What I want to know is, how would it work out in SR, rules-wise?

Extend the danger zone by the blast of the bullet. If the one normal bullet covers a meter then the that exploding piece of hell will now cover 5 meters or what ever the radius would be. If some poor schumk is hit in an over lapping area then he had to resist both or 5 shots. Just a thought.

How about just saying that they can't dodge?

WARNING: Secondhand (maybe 3rd-hand) info from the first time i saw that link.

That is suppositly GW2 footage, apparently shown on TV a short time ago. That bag/tarp under the tractor was holding an an RPG, that was being stashed. That is why the guy is frantically pulling it out after the first burst hit, thinking he would be able to return fire.

EDIT: This is the end or middle of a longer version that shows the RPG being stashed.