Artillery Humor (Canadian Edition)

[togor]

Non-political, hard not to laugh along.

https://youtu.be/gOPEpsGJyCs

[jjrothWA]

Was he an officer?? [AKA GOTCHA!!]

[Mark in Ottawa]

Apparently a regular round for that howitzer is about $10,000 and an Excalibur guided round is about $115,000. Hopefully they didn't fire off a round just as a joke; my taxes are too high now!

[rayg]

That was funny though...

[togor]

Apparently a regular round for that howitzer is about $10,000 and an Excalibur guided round is about $115,000. Hopefully they didn't fire off a round just as a joke; my taxes are too high now!

In the video there do seem to be a dozen or so other rounds already fuzed so maybe they just got him on the first one.

Another clip showing the M777 in Canadian service.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Icqpf4kAz4

[SUPERX-M1]

There are new artillery rounds being developed. One uses rocket assist, perhaps a ramjet. These new types are very expensive. One naval gun for the USS Zumwalt (iirc) was so expensive , over 100,000 each shot, that they dropped the gun. It had extreme range, 40 or perhaps 80 miles.

[Mark in Ottawa]

The story of the M777 in Canadian service is interesting. The Canadian troops in Afghanistan discovered that they really needed a long range artillery piece and needed it in a hurry. Apparently the Canadian Chief of staff was a friend of the head of the US Marines and asked him to relinquish 5 spots on the production line and he did so. The first M777 received was used for training and the next 4 were sent to Afghanistan along with the now trained artillerymen. I was told this by an aquaintance who worked for our Department of National Defence who said that he had worked on the firing tables. He also said that one of the understandings was that the Canadian Army would share their experiences with the weapon with the American military since they were actually the first people to use it in combat. One story that did come out was that apparently a Canadian unit got pinned down and were in trouble and with little choice called in an artillery strike 25 metres from their position instead of the normal 50 metre minimum. The M777 was accrurate enough that it was able to do that.

[jjrothWA]

Something finally WORKED, as designed!!!

[Sunray]

No 'humor' up here. Just humour. snicker. A blank would do that.
"...fire off a round just as a joke..." Kind of looked like it. Everybody else was watching the guy while they fired. The guy was probably an FNG.
Rocket assist arty shells isn't new. Announced in 2016.
"...Canadian troops in Afghanistan..." The CF has no heavy lift capability. We had no way of getting our aged Leopards there(or anywhere else) so the CF rented some Leopard 2's from Germany. Likely rebuilds from when Junior's daddy pulled us out of Europe and left all our kit behind because it would have cost too much(which was any amount to Junior's daddy) to bring home. Junior's daddy used not having a way of getting troops to Norway, that being our NATO tasking for some daft reason, as his excuse for pulling us out.

[barretcreek]

Likely rebuilds from when Junior's daddy pulled us out of Europe.....

You're saying Fidel was making decisions about your troop deployments?

[Sunray]

"...You're saying..." Fidel had nothing to do with it. Junior's daddy was a card carrying communist. Rumoured to have been a Zombie during W.W. II(militia officer who refused to go on active service.) He had no use for the CF and would have disbanded it if he could have. When he pulled us out of Europe, all the heavy kit, like the Leopards we had, was left there and the tanks returned to the German government.

[barretcreek]

I thought he was Fidelito's daddy.