GAU-13

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The General Electric GAU-13 / A is a 30mm Gatling cannon derived from the GAU-8 / A Avenger .

description

The GAU-13 was developed in the late 1970s for use in weapon containers for combat aircraft , primarily for ground attacks.

The GAU-13 is a four-barreled Gatling gun with the locking mechanism of the larger GAU-8 and uses the same 30mm ammunition. In the same way as the GAU-8, the GAU-13 cartridges are fed in without a belt and the empty cases returned to the ammunition chamber. The drive of the GAU-13, however, is pneumatic and not hydraulic, with which theoretically 2,400 rounds can be fired per minute. There are at least 32,000 rounds between individual jamming of the weapon, which means that the reliability can be classified as very high.

Are the same explosive fire - (High Explosive Incendiary - HEI) PGU-13 and armor piercing incendiary with core of depleted uranium (Armor Piercing Incendiary - API) PGU-14 using GAU-eighth In spite of the, compared to siebenläufigen GAU-8, lower cadence the GAU-13 is a very strong fire machine gun .

The GAU-13 is used in the American GPU-5 / A weapon container (sales name GEPOD 30 ). The weapon container is 4.3 m long and can be attached to any NATO 762 mm weapon station. The container contains 352 rounds of ammunition, enough for about nine seconds of continuous fire. It weighs 600 kg empty and 841 kg fully ammunitioned.

The GPU-5 / A was designed for many tactical combat aircraft, including the F-15 Eagle and the F-16 Fighting Falcon . In the mid-1980s, they wanted to develop a special variant of the F-16 for ground support with the GPU-5 / A weapon container in order to obtain a replacement for the A-10 Thunderbolt II or to supplement it.

However, the GPU-5 weapon container did not prove itself in use. It was temporarily used by some F-16s of the National Guard during the Second Gulf War in 1991, but dismantled after only one day due to poor accuracy. Although the weapon had excellent ballistic properties, the suspension at the weapon station was not stable enough and did not offer a sufficiently rigid connection to the aircraft to minimize the movement of the weapon container when it was fired. The recoil was so great that it sometimes bent the bracket of the weapon station. On top of that, the GPU-5 / A was not integrated into the fire control systems of the F-16, so aiming had to be done manually. As a result, the weapon in the target had more of the effect of a cluster bomb and could not be used effectively against armored point targets.

The US armed forces no longer use the GPU-5 weapon container. It is only still used on some Thai F-5E Tiger IIs .

Technical specifications

  • Type: Gatling four- barreled cannon
  • Function: pneumatic external drive
  • Caliber: 30 mm
  • Length: 2,790 mm
  • Total weight: 151 kg
  • Rate of fire: 2,400 rounds per minute
  • Muzzle velocity: 1,030 m / s
  • Bullet weight: (API) 430 g; HEI 360 g

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