We test fired them from the LAV-AD, while I was with FMC. For the standard Hydra's the Dispersion Pattern was way to large, +/- 150 meters @ 1,000 meters range. For general use, the cost of the APKWS may not be worth the Target Effects results. Jake

Canada has shown CV-7s (Hydra-70 equivs) on its MMEV Multi Mission Effects Vehicle. But like FSV said, in standard rocket form, the 70mm rockets disperse too great to be of any precision use. One of the issues that came about from the APKWS (now in APKWS II guise) program was that they (engineers) were experiencing too many unforeseen technical issues shrinking the seeker tech down to that size. Personally, I think that's a money-stealing load of BS, just one more excuse to grab more defense budget dollars. Does anyone here remember that for a few decades, we've had 7cm air defense missiles? (Redeye, Stinger, etc.) Does anyone remember Vought Aircraft's expirements back in the mid-to-late 1980s with guiding 40mm anti-aircraft shells? (the Sgt York DIVADS was a failure, but because of its radar and fire control, not its ammunition.) You were an FMC man, Jake: do you remember the 60mm ETC prototype CIWS/concept test demonstator for the USN, which was suggested to use command-guided shells in 60mm? Does anyone realize that the 3 roughly 35mm diameter "darts" in the Starstreak HVM MANPADS each have a miniature guidance and control section? What about all these microminiature fuzes they've packed into explosive shells as small as 20mm? And engineers say they can't figure out how to get a laser seeker into a 2&3/4 inch diameter rocket? That's a sorry-@ss excuse if I ever heard one. Has this latest generation of engineers gotten stupider (or is it more stupid) than the previous generations who thrived on ingenuity? Or have the defense contractors involved in those programs just put the wrong people IN those programs (appointing and assigning friends and buddies based not on technical expertise nor viable qualifications)? Or, and I think this more likely, they already DID accomplish it, but they're just trying to milk the government for all they can? Cheese and Aged Rice! This is the 21st century! We've got CAD programs and computational fluid dynamics modeling to do all the hard work. And they expect us to believe they are having difficulty sticking laser guidance systems into 70mm rockets? Hang it all, then! Let's just stick those miniature digital cameras from cell phones into the damn things and make them optically guided! I just find it hard to believe that people with military-level security clearances just don't realize how capable COTS systems are, and don't have the ingenuity to figure out how to implement them into weapons systems. I think that, if we can't do it in laser-guided mode, at least an optically-guided (yes, we have very capable coded secured datalinks these days that no terrorist group is going to be able to skirt around or jam) APKWS that could certainly get us, via its nose-mounted "missile cam" (how many of our current and future warriors have already flew these in a thousand video games?) would give even a greater accuracy than a laser seeker. Modern directional thin-beam transmitter antennae will eliminate the chance of adversaries detecting your control signals and activating a countermeasure in the 5-15 second flight time of our "7-Op" rocket. Hell, if US engineers don't know how to put guidance into 70mm rockets anymore, maybe all our adversaries have forgotten how to make effective countermeasures, too? That's not a gamble I want to see us taking. And I just wonder if we'll hear from BAe that they can't package a guidance and control system into that 60mm ODAM for DARPA. If a digital camera in a cellphone is barely a 1/4 inch in diameter, somebody out there has to know how to make a hardened model that can survive launch stresses. iPod Hydra? Motorola LAU-G7?

Guided weapons need something to translate the electrical signals into physical guidance, so it isn't quite that simple, especially when retrofitting to an existing round. Plus you've also got to make sure that the projectile is locked on to your laser. The Starstreak is SACLOS, so there isn't a seeker in the dart, just a reciever and some acuators for control. The question is not if it's possible, but what do you want each round to cost?

"For the standard Hydra's the Dispersion Pattern was way to large, +/- 150 meters @ 1,000 meters range." wow I really didn't think ya the dispersion pattern was that huge. It makes me wonder how Cobra's were able to destory NVA tanks with Anti-armor rockets in the last parts of the Vietnam conflict. 150 meters is 1 1/2 football fields, give or take afew feet. Even at 500 meters the DP is still unacceptable to me.. Makes me wonder if the hydra and zuni systems are just paper weapons. I knew that you couldn't use rockets to Destory a little bird (Firebirds) but I though it had a lot better DP then what you say.

I wonder if the problem isn't with guidance systems, but modifing the control surface's? I doubt that hydras fin/wing's could be used to control the rocket the way ATGM's are. I think they would have to look at a vectored trust control system instead if a wing/fin system, and if that is the case I can see why they would have a problem. Still if they do finish the APKWS project and the price is around 20K a rocket, thats still better then the 100K for a Hellfire or TOW

As far as control surfaces, the 70mm Redeye, Stinger, and whatever Russky models (SA-7, etc) and their chinese copies, all had/have effective-enough control surfaces to steer into aircraft at speeds up to about M1.5 or so (the missiles' speed, not the aircraft). So I wouldn't think it would really be all that difficult to make effective control surfaces on another 70mm diameter weapon. One of the APKWS 1 (first incarnation of the program) had four small "spikes" on its forward wings to detect the radiated signal (I think it was BAe's model), similar in appearance to the radio interferometer (sp?) antennae on the RN's Sea Dart and the 1960s-era Talos SAMs. I believe the idea was to "center" the radiated signal and adjust its trajectory accordingly, rather than mounting a small nose-mounted gimballed seeker like the majority of many other air-to-ground missiles. I'm just basing my speculation/accusations off the fact that 70mm MANPADS have been around (in service) since the 1960s, with the first Redeye tested way back in 1960, a credit to the early electronics engineers for being able to package that technology into a 70mm body. Regardless of its poorer-than-expected overall performance, the fact that they could package the necessary technology that small (tube tech and first-generation semiconductors and transistors) just over 4 decades ago says something. So I'm just struggling to understand why today's engineers, with vastly improved electronics capabilities in considerably smaller circuit architecture, are having any difficulties designing and fabricating effective sensors and control mechanisms. As for price per round, I'm expecting an economy of scale thing: no need to build an entire weapon, when we can just mass-produce seeker/control sections and mount them as easily as nose fuzes onto the front of rockets (I was under the impression that's what the original idea was anyway, not an entirely new stand-alone weapon in itself.) Modern electronics/optical gyros can be made small enough to compensate for a change in center of gravity on the rocket depending on the length of its rocket motor and warhead type: this would be the most difficult part, as it would need several hundred to a few thousand lines of coding (I'm just guessing here, based on the minimal programming the US Army taught me last year) to successfully discern what configuration the rocket is...unless this could be programmed into it from the aircraft's weapons computer, which itself might need the additional software anyway. But software only costs money once: then you just copy it into as many platforms as needed (unless it's Microsoft's, Sony's, or some others', because they don't like that!). I'd still suggest, miniature control mechanisms already work in MANPADS, so if they can't master making laser seeker sensors that small, make them optically guided with nose-mounted cameras. It doesn't need to go all over-expensive like the EFOGM did, because we can get by without using wires or fibers by using a secured datalink, coding the frequency just like WiFi networks and wireless hubs do with their signals. 64- or 128-bit data encryption would easily allow battlefield immunity from ECM. Besides, on today's battlefields, broadcasting active ECM is like painting yourself dayglo orange and telling every living soul within several miles of you exactly where you are. I would find it even harder to believe that any of us armchair warriors would come up with ideas that today's engineers can't even imagine. Considering how many weapons throughout history have been developed with innovative and ingenious imagination rather than just being slight improvements of the previous generations' models, I certainly think there are plenty of available ideas to make it work (guided 70mm mini-missile), but the question is do our current engineers have that same ingenuity and imagination to see and implement it? As we move further along in our technical prowess, I see smaller precision weapons as a logical step in military hardware. Making 70mm guided rockets now will one day be succeeded by even smaller guided rounds with even smaller warheads, but enough precision in them to target windows and vehicle soft spots (hatches, vision blocks, and other parts where armor is weakest) with pinpoint CEPs measured in inches or centimeters. Miniaturized optical guidance is the way to accomplish this, not laser seekers whose designation point may scatter around the target by several feet depending on the stability and distance of the designation system. Maybe that's why an optical system is under consideration for the 60mm ODAM mortar munition...? In my personal opinion, there's just something so much cooler about being able to "fly" the missile first-person style into your target, even to the point that you might fly it through a window or ventilation duct and down a hallway or corridor to hit something deep inside without the need to totall

I cant answer your question directly. I can observe that during my USMC career (1974-1997) we were routinely promised new gee whiz weapons. In most cases a decade later the thing would be summed up by the phrase "gee whiz, it dont work". this is partially an exageration. many of the high tech weapons we accquired did work well. I actually used a couple of them. Unfortunatly most failed to perform under field conditions as well as had been predicted from tests on the lab bench. One expects that 'bugs' have to worked out of any system, but so often what should have been mature well developed systems werre still confined to the maintiance shed while factory reps picked away at them. My wild guess here is the actual engineering problems are far greater than one might suspose from reading Popular Science. In 1995 I was at Ft Sill Ok for artillery training. One afternoon a A10 squadron was praticing dropping lazer guided bombs on the same range as us. The squadron commander was in the last flight and pickled off a bomb, which guided itself directly to the lazer spot team, killing both men. I did not see the final report on this. The preliminary fact finding determined the bomb was a common model, not some experiment item; That the pilot was experinced with the equipment as was the spot team: That the bomb was not released early. The bobmb hit on the rear corner of the vehical the spot team was using (a HumVee). So one of the items the investigators were looking was the possibility that the sunlight reflecting off the tailight lens matched the frequency pattern the bomb guidance was looking for closer than the lazer reflection off the target.

That's a pretty pissed up story, Carl. Right up there with that Sgt York DIVADS locking onto the air circulation fan of a field sh*tter, because just by some one-chance-in-a-billion coincidence the rotation frequency of the fan was a close approximation of the target it was supposed to pick up.

Yeah well it was just one of several lines of inquiry on the causes. The first thing I did after the bomb hit was check with all the Marine artillery FO teams, to see if anyone had a lazer designator active. It would have been another one in a billion chance that someone screwing around illuminated the tail fender of the Humvee just that moment, but we had to ask. As I wrote I never saw the fnal report. All anyone could say for certain is the smart bomb hit the spot teams vehical killing both members. The eight Marines of the two FO teams on the same hilltop were luckier. Just temporarily deaf.

Yes, the laser guided hydra should NOT have taken so long to develop and NOT have taken up much money!!! (I know about red eye was built in the 1960s and it was 70mm) Somebody already said it, they are milking the system, I believe that is true. The army realized they needed something in between unguided Hydras and the expensive Hellfire in Gulfwar 1. It took over a decade to Make it happen! ?!? NOW AS FOR THE MAIN TOPIC QUESTION: They should be used within five years, Especially when the early FCS is introduced. Don’t know why they don’t use them now? On the other hand, I do not think it is intelligent or appropriate to kill one Insurgent or a Carbomb with a laser hydra Rocket ($20,000+ ) when A single MK-19 40mm round will do? =-=-=-=-=-=- that is my opinion