barundus

The 5200 lb limitation was instituted via an ISAQ (Interim Statement of Airworthiness Qualification) in the 90s. Eventually it made its way into the operator's manual. I don't have the ISAQs any more. You'll just have to take my word for it. Sent from my SM-X710 using Tapatalk

MGTOW for the OH-58D is limited to 5200lbs.

I'm curious how you'd compare the two (admittedly an apples/oranges comparison) to support the statement? By weight? Volume? How many menu pages? Buttons?

@NeedzWD40 Great work. Particularly the history, use-cases, and characteristics of the Hydra and rockets in general. Clearly you've done some good research, and you put together a more comprehensive summary than a lot of real-world users know about the program. Kudos and gold stars.

Interesting standpoint, considering it's literally the entire reason the Apache Longbow was conceived and fielded.

A bit of a departure in the Apache forum, but perhaps a good place to talk about the design philosophy differences between the GE engines that went into the Blackhawk and Apache, and the Rolls Royce/Allison engine that powered the KW. I've always had real heartburn about the "save the engine" design philosophy in the GE. Limiting RPMs when TGTs are approaching limits (acknowledged mostly due to pilot error to end up in the situations in the first-place), or limiting performance in truly life-threating dynamic situations, is such an "engineer-centric" versus "pilot-centric" design approach. Contrasted with this, the FADEC in the Rolls Royce/Allison in the 58D featured "limit override logic", which, when triggered, opened the flood-gates and removed all the normal nannies and performance-limiting algorithms and replaced them with absolute engine-limit gates that torched the engine, but the pilot got everything those little gerbils in the hot-section could crank out. In normal operation, FADEC provides all the same goodies the DECU/EDECU does on the GE 701s. But when that "oh shit" moment comes, the designers provided a life-saving mechanism I appreciated from the pilot standpoint. Limit override required a number of criteria to be matched to trigger (Nr drooped below 93% or even *approaching* 93% at a certain rate, collective moving at a certain rate, etc), which then removed the normal inhibitors and allowed the pilot to tap-into more juice to get out of that sticky situation. Limit-override was only available in the AUTO mode, so if the FADEC failed, the pilot still had to go to MANUAL mode, which is essentially the same as placing the 701s in LOCKOUT. Anyhoo, interesting discussion.

It generally took a day and a half of the FIST truck parked in our hangar, with an aircraft plugged into wall power next to it, and the FISTers and a couple nerd pilots fiddle-fucking the TACFIRE to try and figure out how to get them to talk to each other. Six months later those guys would be gone, and we'd have to learn it all over again for the next gunnery. Neither the canon-cockers, nor the aviators were very proficient. I always took an interest in the digital side of things, and tried to make it work. There aren't many of us left that have actually conducted TACFIRE digital missions, much less fired real Copperheads. Things have progressed radically in the last twenty years, but to my knowledge no-one has ever conducted a digital fire mission *in combat*. We'll get there. I would very much like to see it in DCS though.

Ya, man. I wasn't discounting your points. In fact I was corroborating them. You're absolutely correct it was cludgy and difficult. No need to get defensive. Read the description on the vid. If you've actually conducted a digital fire mission with live rounds, I'd love to know about your experiences.

A little blast from the past:

And then in the same thread a few posts later... Strange way to establish your bona fides...

I dug around a bit and found an old vid in my archives showing some test footage of Hydra shots on a closed range. Here's two vids; one shows the payload deploy, and a tree happened to be in the way right after the darts deployed. The other vid shows the perspective in the impact area.

The darts in the M255A1 (the current use type) are 60 grains. About 1200 of them. At 5000 meters they're still going about 225m/s. The old M255 used 28 grain darts. About 2500 of them.

Hard to know whether the darts tumble initially on fuze-function. My "educated speculation" is no; they don't tumble drastically, but probably a bit. From a pilot's perspective, I don't care. When the expulsion charge actuates, the packed darts are forced out the front of the cargo tube, much like a shotgun. When ranged properly, the fuze is supposed to function at a certain distance from the target, with the standoff calculated to produce the desired "beaten zone" I mentioned above, enough time to stabilize, and arrive with the velocity to retain kinetic energy equal to a 5.56 round. The M255 is intended for soft targets, and light skin penetration. No reason to assume they're not effective, based on a YT video shooting darts from a shotgun.

Ballistically, each nail in the M255A1 is roughly equivalent to a 5.56mm round at its effective range (this is reliant on correct firing procedures, proper ranging and fuzing, and the fuze function at the proper distance). As designed, the beaten-zone of a M255A1 deployment is roughly a 30m square, with roughly one nail per square meter.

Gross. That's sounds about as much fun as a virtual fuel sample before every flight.