Quote:
Originally Posted by Wild Goose
I can see that you're using the GAU-8's ammo as a starting point, but not all 30mm is equal. Given the sizes of the ammo, I'd think that the 36mm shells used by the TSFs would be closer to upsized 30 x 113mm (0.34 kg) used by the Apache's M230 chaingun, rather than the 30 x 173mm used by the A-10's GAU-8.
Assuming a weight of about 0.40 kg (ballpark estimate), a single mag of 2000 shells weighs 800kg; max load is 12 mags, which leads us to 9.6 metric tons of weight for ammo. This is a reasonable figure given stores carried by modern fighters.
|
I don`t understand why you discuss 30-mm projectiles - 36mm would be twice heavier.
If we look at soviet 37-mm cartrige for 37-mm cannon 61-K
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/37_mm_a...939_%2861-K%29
We can see that weight of the cartridge is about 1500 g and shell - 650-730 g.
MLA cartriges are caseless, but we must add the weight of the powder, so we could safely operate 900-1000 g weight for one cartrige.
That gives us about 20 tons (dont forget about weight of magasines).