Caesar 155mm self-propelled howitzer

A well oiled artillery crew is a thing of beauty in my opinion. Skip to 3:40 to watch them. And that chassis sure does flex a lot.

cool!

now THATS what i call a technical

Gun depression has me impressed.

That looks like a recipe for a deadlined vehicle after every mission.

Cool.

I believe these tubes are superior to our current m109 iteration.

We are badly badly behind in Artillery.

I would like to know what the range probable error is on that thing. With all the flexing and movement during firing I'll bet it is a large number.

Why is that? I know just enough about artillery to dig deep and pray.

Kinda reminds me of reloading, only noisier.

Inconsistency in the firing platform can induce innaccuracy.

And we are behind in artillery.

We should have bought PzH 2000s ten years ago.

The way that vehicle is flexing looks ridiculous.

Counter battery fire in 3...2...1...

looks like a phone pole truck

Probably not much. The hydros keep the recoil going straight back until after the round is out of the tube. All the vehicle movement, flexing, and barrel bounce comes after the most of the recoil is absorbed. There is a lot of movement in all artillery platforms, but most of it doesn't affect accuracy.

Paint them white and attach a fake man bucket on the end of the gun tube and you can hide them in plain sight.

I'd like to subscribe to your news letter.

Looks retarded.

That is an enormously unstable firing platform.

It's a good thing artillery is a thing of the past––––look, a new air force video of a bomb being dropped! Let's just use those instead.


Fucking congress....

Why was the Crusader program shit-canned, any ways? Thought that was to replace/supplement our Paladin systems?

Anything with a 155mm gun is going to move under recoil.

All that matters is that it can be back on target in time to fire again.

Thanks for that video. I always liked the Caesar, despite being a French product. I've wondered if an analogue could be built in the US using the HEMTT or something similar.

In the 60s I was around quite a bit of American Artillery (my mos was 1193) and I didn't see that much movement in them at firing. About the only thing I can think of that would be comparable would be a 175mm gun. It had a range probable error of around 100 meters.

An 8 inch howitzer on the other hand had a range probable error of 6 meters.

1. Crew size was 2 - not enough people to perform crew-level maintenance like breaking track, or pulling security, much less operate, even in a degraded mode, when you lose one of them to injury or illness.

2. It was expensive - and the army hung a lot of jee-whiz new capabilities on it right from the begining, instead of adding them as the program matured.

3. A lot of the new munitions for it were delayed or never fully produced, like SADAARM. The track is just part of a weapons system. Without the new rounds, you don't get much bang for the buck from the new gun.

4. Army has always sucked hind tit in procurement - AF and Navy get thier new toys easier.

5. About the time it was coming along, Shinsecki and them decided everything had to be rapidly deployable, and to fit inside some specific number of c-130 airlifts that the Air Force never guaranteed in the first place - (this also led to the abomination known as "Stryker".). Even heroic measures, like deleting a pair of roadwheels, could not get this leviathin light enough.

6. Originally, it used a lot of beyond-leading-edge technology, like regenerating liquid propellant. As more and more of those things failed to develop enough to actually go on the gun, the reason for the gun got smaller and smaller, compared to what we had already vs. the money involved.

7. "Crusader" didn't really play well as a name for a system we hoped to sell to friendly Muslim countries in the Middle East.

8. Cold War ended, and with that the focus on major combat operations was greatly diminished. Heavy self-prop arty travels with tanks and IFVs to support them - "peace dividend" meant no Crusader.

9. Crusader Concept and Evaluation simulation runs using Distributed Interactive Simulation compliant JANUS revealed that a self-propelled artillery piece fast enough to keep up with its own tanks and brads runs th erisk of running into ENEMY tanks and IFVs, and it was already too heavy - adding more armor to live under the enemy fire would have made it more so.

that bitch is still vibrating like 10 seconds after it fires. So that's going to be a problem.

yeah, cool, but when does it fire while moving?


Seriously, what keeps little burny bits from roasting the guy as he loads the powder bag?

Did you ever do any research on the M109L52 howitzer? The 109 with the PzH 2000 cannon?

Crusader was overly ambitious. The unit price hit $25M in early 2000s dollars.

It's decent, but once you figuire in the new turret and the new chassis from PIM you may as well have bought the PzH.

That's why you have an ammunition section.



Correct.



Crusader and the PzH have the same rate of fire as a battery of legacy pieces. The Army cut tube numbers by 35% in the 1990s in anticipation of newer systems picking up the slack. The longer gun will push legacy rounds further. The cannon would be great even with current HE and DPICM rounds.



At least we cut the losing programs.



This was a mistake. Although you can put a Denel 105 on a Stryker.



Laser ignition is the future.

It's French.

The chassis is a Renault Sherpa 10 for systems delivered to the French army otherwise it is a 6x6 Unimog U2450.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAESAR_self-propelled_howitzer

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/57/CAESAR_firing_in_Afghanistan.jpg
Large image

Archer

"Almost" counts.

Tradeoff to get light weight. And it looked like it was stable during the 6 rounds in 58 seconds by the time it fired again.

thats cool, i like how it is built on a truck chassis, seems more economical than a tracked vehicle

I'd rock one of those.

On the other hand you don't want to be shooting something within 50 meters of your position if it has a range probable error of 100 meters.

I think that it probably is pretty accurate.

The platform itself looks pretty good during firing. Little to no displacement––if the chassis moves, that is one thing, but the piece itself looks like it does not move that much.

Like someone else said––all 155mm or greater will move.

Additionally, if you can account for the error from firing the howitzer off of that platform, you can still be very accurate.

Sorry, I was thinking of artillery fire as an outbox thing, I forgot that infantry views it as an inbox thing.

I was a forward observer for an Infantry company for 7 months in the mountains of Vietnam. As I stated earlier my mos was 1193, Artillery small unit commander.

I still think like a forward observer. It was a very formative period of my life.

I would have liked to have been an FSO.

All it needs is a Magpul grill guard and Magpul mudflaps

That does look pretty sweet although I'd feel nervous with the business end pointed up my arse while driving.

What advantage would this have over rocket artillery? It looks like a major pain in the ass to reload.

Seriously?

Rocket artillery is a whole different ball game. Harder to deconflict airspace, less responsive, limited warhead choice, more expensive.

This system is cheap and effective.

Rocket artillery really only has a place at the CORPS and DIV level, or with control delegated to a smaller SOF element.

The ammo section, and the resuipply vehicle they ride in, have the same issues - plus the ammo section is often not co-located with the artillery piece.

They said it carries 18 complete rounds of ammo. That could easily be used up in a single 3 minute firemission.

Unless you have an ammo truck sitting right there some one might be in deep doo doo.

Best job in the Field Artillery. I have well over 10 years as an FSO.

I liked being an FDO as well, but FSO is where the money is at IMO.

Thanks for the tip.

Caesar meets the accuracy standards laid out in the Joint Ballistics MOU between NATO countries

There is some barrel/tube whip but most part the shaking a vibration you see is after the round leaves the tube. The tube has settled prior to the next round firing and the fire control systems takes up for displacement.


Prior to the DFCS on the 777, they had problems making the JBMOU standard because it too hard to take up for displacement, but the digital system does that

Least I could do. I was one of the three OPFOR controllers in the JANUS scenarios. I got a company of tanks in among the Crusaders. It was not pretty.

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