Just been reading this depressing news story on the BBC News website. Its bad enough soldiers being blown up and shot by the enemy, nevermind being strafed by an Apache from your own side.
You would think they would have sort of system for checking the status of the troops in their sights, before opening up with a 30mm cannon. I cannot figure out how now one was killed (thank god).
I would count on a lot of “missing”.
There are various methods but none are foolproof. There is a reason why calling for fire that close to your own position is called “danger close”.
ETA: I’m not sure what you are looking for with this thread. You put it in IMHO so I put forth my humble opinion that getting shot is bad.
I would avoid it the same way I try to avoid being knifed in an alleyway:
I try not to be in a location at a time where that eventuality seems likely.
This sounds like a good candidate for one of those “Worst Case Scenario” books.
No sure way. The incoming rounds are so heavy they will burrow through any practical amount of overhead cover. Lie down perpendicular to the aircraft’s line of flight. Think about the many benefits offered by Serviceman’s Group Life Insurance.
There was a youtube video of an American Apache helicopter firing on insurgents sometime in 04/05. Due to a Hague convention regarding weapons, the 25 or 30 mm cannon is ilegal as an anti-personel weapon. Fine for anti-material but you can’t aim it at folks on the ground directly.
How the American crew did it was simply to aim at the truck that they were operating with, which caused the truck to explode as one would think , but the conical nature of the shell pattern meant that the Iraqis got perforated as well.
The British crew may have been aiming at a geographical feature, and expecting the same results.
Declan
Be made out of cotton candy. Alternately, mayonnaise.
No I demur. The Moscow Convention prohibits the use of poison or explosive bullets below a certain size. I know of no other convention setting a size limitation. You are perfectly legal to hunt snipers if you want to.
The “.5 is an anti-materiel weapon” is, I maintain just an urban legend that has wide currency.
I am willing to be corrected by an authoritative cite.
There a whole bunch of clips on liveleak.com that show Apaches opening up with 30mm on individuals… no vehicles in sight, just lone fighters in the middle of a field getting walloped.
Unfortunately, no such system exists. Hence this sort of thing is actually pretty common. The only noteworthy thing about this particular incident is that it was a british helicopter strafing british troops. Usually squaddies are being strafed by American aircraft, since the US can afford to field more than 3 aircraft and put ammo on board them.
There is research aimed at developing single-soldier scale IFF system, but it’s still years before it’ll be field ready.
Uh, no? AFAIK explosive bullets are forbidden only if they weight under 400 grams, and it’s only relevant to small arms. As stated in St. Petersburg Declaration. In practical terms anything of caliber 20mm or more is considered artillery and perfectly OK to use it to shell humans into pieces.
Wear a fully charged HEV suit?
You won’t get it from me! I have no military experience whatsoever! I do, however, have a question/WAG. I wonder if the idea that big guns are only for hard things started as a bit of practical advice to infantrymen: “Save the big, heavy, expensive bullets for things that need big bullets; shoot people with small, cheap, light bullets” and just got boiled down to “Soldier, the BFG50 is not an anti-personnel weapon!”
My guess is that it is some bit of exaggeration that got taken way to seriously. “This weapon is so badass that it just ain’t right to use on a puny human,” morphed into, “This weapon is so big that you can’t fire it on people,” became “Those U.N. human rights pussies say we can only use it on vehicles,” became, “It’s a violation of INTERNATIONAL LAW to target a person with anything bigger than 7.62… until you get to 155mm artillery.”
That only helps on the easy difficulty setting
The Moscow Convention of 1899 was called to limit certain arms. The Russians, being technologically backward, proposed (and got) a ban on some types of bullets such as:
Glass or x-ray invisible bullets
Poisoned bullets
Explosive bullets under (some size or another)
They did this because the Russians suspected other nations would soon develop such weapons, giving them an advantage. This is, methinks, where the idea of a bullet being too big to be used on people came from. The fifty was big enough to be explosive (but it is not) and so could not be used against people (if it were explosive).
Now it is just handed down from sergeant to soldier around the mess table.
HEV = Helicopter Evasion Vestments? 
Is that John Carter’s radium pistol?
This is merely an extension of not being able to use square bullets on Christians, is it not?