It depends on who supplies the DU. The stuff we used for shielding technetium generators back at GE had to be less than .35% U-235 while the US DoD requires .2 or .3%.
[Moderator Note]
Nadir, let’s dial it back a little here. No warning issued, but a bit less snark is in order in GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
PS. This goes for everyone in this thread.
It depends on the helicopter. The heavy attack helicopters that are analogous to the A-10, like the AH-64 or Mi-24, are about as robust, but it’s important to keep perspective on what ‘robust’ really means in the context.
Compared to a main battle tank, which can take major hits over and over without significantly impairing its ability to fight, all aircraft are flimsy creations in that they rely on a long series of parts staying in good working order just to not fall out of the sky. The heavy ground attack aircraft are hardened only in the sense that a bunch of random soldiers with rifles generally won’t be able to shoot them down in any span of time, and glancing hits with lighter anti-aircraft weapons may not immediately take them out. This makes them significantly more durable than your average military aircraft, but generally, if they get hit by anything actually made to shoot at aircraft, it’s still going to seriously ruin their day.
That problem is approached by attack helicopters spending a lot of effort and, in the more modern ones, technology, on not being shot at by anti-aircraft weapons in the first place. Hiding in terrain and attacking from out of line of sight are the main source of survivability. The A-10’s design strategy was different. The idea there was more to make the system so cheap and basic that they could be fielded in enough numbers to simply take the losses. It’s almost a Soviet style, really, and is one of many reasons why it was not embraced very warmly by the USAF.
Well, why would Israel need those boxes on wheels when you already have the badass Achzarits or Namers? (These are main battle tanks converted to APCs for those who don’t have a fascination with the IDF like I do) To paraphrase The Lonely Island, “Fuck wheels, I’m in a tank muthafucka!”
But the A-10 is seriously badass and I wonder why the IDF doesn’t get itself some. I would think it would be an ideal platform for the area… Israel is not a huge country so you don’t need fighter-bombers that can do 1000mph in a straight climb. But you might want a jet that can take a serious pounding (apparently the A-10 can fly with a wing, tail and engine shot off) while delivering a serious pounding. Who knows? Maybe the IDF will someday develop their own version of the A-10, the IA-10EB (for Extra Badass). I’d pay money to see it.
Alessan might be able to make a better guess on this than me, but it could be the amount of pilots in the israeli airforce. If they only have x amount of zoomies available at any one given time, better to have them in the 15’s and 16’s.
Besides, only the gun is really all that much more different. Every other ordinance or missile is platform agnostic. The hog was meant to be survivable, not invincible and then they have to have another logistics pipeline for the spare parts and maintenance.
Declan
I’ve got a Master Sergeant in my squadron who once had an A-10 come in to provide some CAS for his team.
The way he tells the story, they’re hunkered down, waiting for their air support to come in, listening for that distinctive shriek of jet planes.
BRBRBRBRBRBBRBRBRBRBRBRBRBRBBRAPPPPPPPPPPPP!!!
They never knew the A-10 was there until it opened up with the Avenger cannon from almost directly above them. He described it as a “genuine bowel voiding experience”:eek: And they knew it was coming. 
Pure U-238 is still radioactive.
It is also very hard. The only reasonable substitute is tungsten, which is expensive. Depleted uranium is very cheap for the US, since we have huge stockpiles of it left over from refining uranium for reactors.
I looked at the presentation for the Traveling Wave Reactor and part of the pitch for it was that it could burn depleted uranium and we had over a 100 year supply of fuel already refined and stockpiled.
There are also high explosive incendiary rounds for the GAU-8 cannon.
How hard would it be to drill a hole in the side of a Hercules and put a gatty and a fire control in there? I know the AC-130 is a bit more complicated than that, but I think the principle should still be good.
Also, what about the Super Tucano? According to Wikipedia the USAF is supposed to be getting about a hundred of those from Brazil. Apparently we don’t always need to bring a chainsaw (A-10) to a knife fight.
It isn’t the world’s hardest engineering problem, but it isn’t simple, either. The problem is accuracy. For example, if you stick something out of the side of an airplane, the air tends to be moving rather quickly, making a gun barrel flutter. Of course, this is nothing that can’t be solved, but it is somewhat more difficult than cutting a hole and bolting down a gun.
Those are intended to be used to train foreign air forces, not as a US combat aircraft.
I want to say that that’s basically how the first gunships were set up. C-47 Dakotas equipped with a broadside of miniguns. The concept and the technology gradually developed until we got to the current generation, an AC-130J which as I recall actually carries fewer guns, but has also added wing-mounted bomb racks.
I’ve seen video filmed with night vision in Iraq of an AC-130 doing a night firing demonstration. There’s the bowel-voiding sounds, as you so nicely put it, and you see these big green globs streaking to the ground as the 40mm stuff hits. It looks and sounds like something from War of the Worlds.
I tossed the question to a (retired) Norwegian Air Force captain and a swedish friend of his, who was a grenadier with the UNPROFOR forces during Bosnia, today. Their answer was both immediate and in perfect agreement.
If Norway - or NATO - is ever in a situation where we require A-10s or AC-130s, the US will be on our side. If they’re not, we won’t have air superiority anyway. Secondarily, on the extremely limited military scale that Norway operates on, there is very little we could accomplish with them that ground forces with artillery support and conventional air support can’t do, cheaper.