The Military and Veterans' Room
How do you safely fire an artillery piece from a small vehicle? With a recoil reduction system.
Army Tries Out Humvee-Mounted Howitzer
Read the rest of the article at the link.he Army is checking out two sizes of a unique low-recoil howitzer system: a 155mm gun on a 6×6 truck, Brutus, and a 105mm on a 4×4 Humvee, Hawkeye. That’s an extraordinarily small vehicle to mount an artillery piece, and reducing recoil is the key to making it work.
The “soft recoil” system was developed by Mandus Group and integrated on vehicles by Humvee manufacturer AM General. By shifting the howitzer barrel forward and installing better hydraulics, the system reduces the recoil – depending on the elevation and range of the shot – anywhere from 40 to 60 percent, AM General CEO Andy Hove told me.
If you cut the recoil in half, the whole artillery system need be only half as heavy to absorb the stock, Hove went on. “You can save a tremendous amount of weight,” he said, which translates into a cheaper, lighter vehicle, with lower fuel and maintenance costs, that’s easier to deploy abroad and sustain in the field.
“Just on the gun itself, the soft recoil system has fewer operating parts that need to be maintained than the current recoil system,” he told me – and they’re under much less strain, so they’ll break down less.
The soft-recoil system scales up and down, so there are actually two versions.
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Originally Posted by MMC
