jmasly@mainz-emh2.army.mil (John Masly) (02/23/91)
From: John Masly <jmasly@mainz-emh2.army.mil> >msoques@mozart.AMD.COM (Martin Soques) writes: > >One of the "smart" weapons the US Army wants to use in Desert Storm >is the Copperhead artillery round.... I also read/heard somewhere >recently that when the US Army did a couple of test firings...in the >Saudi desert, the shells missed so badly that the observers did not >even know where the shells landed. Could be. The Copperhead (M712?) is indeed laser guided, but differs greatly from the laser guided bombs being used to such great effect in the KTO. During a bombing run, the aircraft locks the laser designator onto the target, and releases the munition. The laser 'spot' is within the munition's field of view (FOV) for most, if not all, of it's travel to the target, so guidance is continuous from release to impact. Not so with the Copperhead. The Copperhead is an unguided (ballistic) round for a good portion of its travel to the target. The laser seeker is pointed at the sky or the far horizon for most of the trajectory. Not until the projectile is well along the descending limb of the trajectory does the seeker point in a direction where it can acquire a laser designator spot. The longer it takes the seeker to acquire the designator spot, the less time the projectile has to maneuver to hit the target. The somewhat small control surfaces on the Copperhead do not provide any robust maneuvering forces, so the projectile can't 'fly' very far in a short time. These two factors limit the 'footprint' that the Copperhead has for acquireing and hitting a target. Now, add to this the fact that the laser designator is a man controlled device. If the guy is not pointing the designator at the right place at the right time, the projectile isn't going to 'see' anything. On top of everything, since the maneuverability of the projectile is somewhat limited, a lot depends upon the 'Cannon Cocker' 8-) who is firing the Copperhead, getting the round into a 'basket' that allows the seeker system to acquire the designator spot. (Were we really going to use this system in Central Europe????!!!!) By the way, the 'development' of this system is interesting. As I understand it (I could be wrong), the initial development was not done by the the ammunition developers, but by the organization that was concerned with the cannons. They had some 'extra' money available one year, so they decided to do a 'what if' study on guided artillery projectiles. The next year they did the same, and the next year, and the next.......Lo and Behold!...one year the Army discovered that it had spent so much on this developmental-what-if (that was not a budgeted line item) that it would be political (and budgetary) suicide to admit that it was a somewhat less than optimum weapon system. ..Voila!, the M712 Copperhead. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ John Masly, Mainz Army Depot, Germany, APO NY 09185 ------------------------------------------------------------------------