Joint Task Force Pope

[Hoth_902]

Great work Mike.. Your work is looking amazing and your painting skills get better and better.

[pmskaar]

Wow! More great looking vehicles, Redleg! You are really on a roll for sure.

As an aside, when I was in AOB (Armor Officer Basic)) we actually did some tank gunnery on the Sheridan. This was back in 1976 when the Sheridan was still in Cav units. In AOB, our course was a combined armor and cavalry course back then. We trained to do armor stuff and also did Cav stuff like recon and bridge classification.

[redleg]

Thanks guys! I feel like my painting really improved when I started to focus on how much paint UI have on the brush. I used to try to get a good coat with all the colors, but now, after the base green coat is on, I go very light on the black and brown, and then I dry brush lighter shades on top. Still a lot of room for improvement!

Pete, did gunnery for the Sheridans include the missile, or just the gun? I have been around tanks and Brads for Table VIII and the mech units did not shoot any missiles, but if the main gun is your missile launcher......

[pmskaar]

Hi Redleg

We only fired the 152mm rounds. No missiles were allocated to us for gunnery as they were expensive, especially for us newbie officers. We did use a Shillelagh simulator with 1970s technology to experience firing and tracking a missile.

[panzergator]

Each M60A2 fired one missile during our New Equipment Training (August, '75) and trained for 4 weeks at Vilseck . It was a 3000 meter shot and honestly, the target was VERY hard to identify. During two subsequent gunneries, we fired no missiles. We had the trainer at home station for simulations. If you think about it, the intervisibility (distance between terrain features) in our AO (Fulda Gap) was an average 1500 meters. The missile needed 1000 meters to launch and pick up the infrared signal to start tracking, so your missile target box is 500 meters, GENERALLY. The Russian is trying to advance at 30 kmh. How much time do you have to engage before you're trying to yank out the missile to load HEAT? The 152mm gun round had a max EFFECTIVE range of 1500 meters. How many rounds are you going to get off before the Russians are rummaging around in your shorts? Are you really going to try a missile shot with its flight time to target or are you going for the gun round first? Donn Starry thought our rate of fire for the gun round would be one per minute. Given that, if the Russkies had come over for a tour in '75-'76, you could still find me on that battle position with12 missiles in the racks (I did have ONE missile-worthy missile shot). At any rate, that's my hindsight covering force math. I WOULD have been hollering for more arty, if the frequencies weren't jammed.