Oops! We Forgot the Gun!

[Tuckerfan]

It seems that the RAF thought they didn’t need to put a machine gun on their latest fighter.

A powerful wing-mounted cannon was ditched four years ago in a bid to save £90 million on the £109 billion Eurofighter project.

Of course, this has now turned out to be a bad idea.

The cannon had been seen as outdated but Air Commodore Andrew Lambert, one of the RAF’s leading air power strategists, said that view was now “old thinking”.

He told the Daily Telegraph: "When you are dealing with terrorists and other unpredictable situations you want all the flexibility you can get and a gun gives you a lot of utility.

Thankfully, they’ve decided to go back to the original design and install the gun. Only one problem

it cannot fire

:eek:

[Neurotik]

Didn’t the US go through this in the 60s or 70s? I believe that one of their production fighters didn’t have any guns, only missiles, until they realized that even with missiles, guns were still a good idea.

[Tuckerfan]

Yup. The F-4 Phantom II.

[Tapioca_Dextrin]

The British Navy has known for years that ammunition is an old fashioned concept.

The 2000 Ignoble award for

PEACE (awarded to)
The British Royal Navy, for ordering its sailors to stop using live cannon shells, and to instead just shout “Bang!”

[Ale]

Now I have this mental image of a fighter pilot, after being ordered to make a straffing pass on a terrorists convoy, rolling down the window, swinging the cannon out with one hand and clubbing the bad guys in the head with it.

[casdave]

I seem to remember the Tornado having concrete radar.

Originally it had been part of the overall program to develop a radar that would fit into the nose cone, and the weight, as in all avionics design programs, was strictly specified, as was the size.

Well, we couldn’t buy fro the Yanks, would’ve dented our pride too much, despite them having something operational and meeting the spec, so we brushed the problem under the carpet and carried on regardless, after all, those clever people ar Marconi or somesuch were bound to come up with the goods in time for the first test flights.

Except they didn’t, nor did they manage to get it working in the commisioning flight, nor even when it was operational, but anyway, who needs some new fangled complicated doppler radar that’s capable of picking out things like tanks on the ground anyway.

So in the end a lump of very special concrete was fitted o the airframe would basically fly. it must have been special, because it weighed exactly the same as the spec for the original radar cone.

Dunno if they ever got it working or if they bought from the Yanks.

You maybe find it difficult to believe ?

It got nicknamed, the Blue Circle radar after the cement company.

Look on the link for 28 Feb 2000 column 58 about half way down.

http://www.publications.parliament…xt/00228-17.htm

This all follows the proud precedent set by the disastrously expensive and useless Nimrod airborne anti submarine project which was supposed to also be a platform for long distance airborne radar, in the end we bought US made AWACS.