The LAV hung out with Green Berets at Ft. Bragg for a day:
Awesome stuff. The javelin is breathtaking. It’s one of those things I’d like to shoot someday, but know I never will. Well I’ve heard from a friend of a friends cousins brothers uncle that you could shoot them overseas, but that just sounds sketchy.
Comments
15 responses to “Slow Motion Weapons Footage From Ft. Bragg”
slow pew slow pew slow pew
:)
Haha
Most of the guys I know that went to Javelin Training didn’t even get to shoot one. You train a lot with simulators and locking on to shit, but in the duration of the course I dont think they fire many rounds. Pretty pricy I’d guess, but we were just leg grunts, the varsity boys definately have a bigger check book so I’d imagine they get to throw more exotic balls of fun and fire down range.
Aw damn. Yea I can see that though… Nothing seems to be cheap.
Each Command Launch Unit (CLU) i.e. the thing you hold onto and look through, costs around $100,000 but is reusable. The missile itself is around $80,000 a pop. It’s pretty rare to actually get to shoot a live missile. I’ve never been to Javelin training but I was a TOW missile Gunner. In all the years I was in the Army and Army National Guard, I shot exactly one live missile.
Lol $80k! Holy… Ok whoever told me you could shoot one for a few hundred in Cambodia obviously just made that up. The TOW looks really cool too… That’s awesome you trained / shot it.
I never got to shoot a live round… but I got to (hah!) carry the heavy assed MILES version around for a week in Florida.
Meh… I too was a TOW gunner, and I can tell you that while the slo-mo looks cool, the firing of most true antitank missiles, (ie the TOW, Javelin, or even the old Dragon) is pretty anti-climactic– the Dragon at least provides a lot of laughs as you watch it slowly “putt putt putt” downrange.
But with the TOW, it’s: depress fire switch, wait for a couple seconds with the only indication that you did anything being a slight high pitched whine from the gyros spinning up, then a pop, followed by a slight whooosh, and the feeling that the weapon system just got a whole lot lighter in the TU. The breathtaking part of a TOW launch is, predictably, the impact. Probably, the reason for this is the use of 2 different motors, the launch motor that just kicks the missile out of the “tube” and then the flight motor that ignites once its been “kicked” free of the weapon system.
The Mk19, and to a much lesser extent the m203 and its variants, were very similar in that aspect–they fired with very little drama, until impact. All these examples contrasted with say, standing on the spade of an M2 .50 BMG or “plinking” away with an M82.
Sounds pretty intense to me. I can imagine though like you said the best part is impact.
The dragon goes put! Put! Put! LMAO. It does sound like that.
When I was a kid my dad was an engineer on the dragon (70s) at Redstone Arsenal and I got to get out of school one day to go watch test firing at a range w him. (Imagine that these days). The soldiers even gave me a used “motor” from down range. Kind of an ingenious system for the day. They couldn’t make one motor that would burn the whole flight time predictably so they stuck little rockets all over it for course corrections as it flew.
You can shoot RPG-7s in Cambodia for about $350; Javelins not so much…
Ah ok that makes more sense.
And I thought the Mk-19 was a piece of crap, that Mk-47 looks like it’s about to fall apart.
Never speak of my beloved MK-19 that way. And that Mk-47 was not properly secured.
I got to handle the Eryx system when I was getting platoon weapons training but we never got to shoot it. It was kind of neat plugging the Mirabel thermal sight onto the launcher unit and seeing the redscale thermal image. It kind of reminded me of a bad Atari game. Shooting the Carl Gustav was much more fun, although I only ever got to fire two TP-RAP rounds, nothing with a live warhead.