Apache rocket attack....drunken shotgun of the gods

[adultery]

seems to be absolutly worthless...the rockets are fired haphazardly over a 2-3km line

i would imagine from the results, it looks like the pilot is firing while pulling out of a steep dive

rather than concentrating the rocket fire on a local area

i know they can do it....seen it on the gulf war videos

[bodkin]

Yeah, it seems like they are doing a strafing run rather than trying to focus the fire.

[Renaud]

Agreed...I called in 2 Apache rocket attacks on the center of a huge building and never got a hit...the rockets stream out in a long trail on the ground either before or after the building. This was a 50 meter square building with 3 stories. Luckily I was still 100+ meters from the closest side and the long streams of missiles didn't impact my nearby troops.

[flamingknives]

What rocket do you suppose that they are using?

[Peter Cairns]

I haven't played the game so I can't comment on the specifics but I will throw this in.

BFC probably had to decide what they were going to simulate, and it may well be that tactical doctrine is that to hover and volley fire is suicidal in an active theatre such as Syria.

You might have got away with it in GW1, but it's not how you are trained to do it.

Now they could give you an option of choosing High or Low Risk.

To minimise risk you do what you do now, come in fast and get out quick, sacrificing accuracy and concentration to minimise danger.

A a higher risk attack would be concentarted and accurate but with a far higher chance of being hit.

If the latter new choice could be built in to scenario design so that if an Apache goes down you need to divert resources to a rescue ( with your chances of meeting your original objectives going out the window), then you would need to use a judgement on which is best.

I suppose I can sum all that up by saying, maybe it doesn't look like Iraq, because it isn't Iraq.

Peter.

[the Fighting Seabee]

OK Peter, play the game and you'll see that the rocket fire is too inaccurate, even for a moving chopper. Go to liveleak and you'll see countless rocket attacks from fast moving choppers hitting an area within 50 meters. In this game, the rockets literally hit from one end of the map to the other. Sorry but apaches are way more accurate than that.

[Oddball_E8]

yeah... it actually looks like a bombdrop by a WWII plane

[molotov_billy]

Originally posted by Peter Cairns:

BFC probably had to decide what they were going to simulate, and it may well be that tactical doctrine is that to hover and volley fire is suicidal in an active theatre such as Syria.

Even a brief perusal of youtube or liveleak.com will show CMSF simulation of rocket attacks to be completely inaccurate, strafing platform or otherwise. Show us a video, or any evidence whatsoever, to support your claims?

[JasonC]

The correct dispersion pattern for unguided 2.75 inch rockets fired from a typical attack helo run is for a dozen fired rounds to all land in an area about 200 feet wide by about 400 feet long in the axis of the attack, or say 65 by 130 meters, with half of the rockets landing within the middle region, about 30m wide by 55-70 meters long.

Single pairs can be more accurate in the side to side spread, but the error in the long axis does not change, making large salvos more effective than repeated attempts at accuracy with just a couple.

The typical attack profile from which that CEP stems involves a 110 knot airspeed, a range of 1000 meters in the slant, and a firing altitude around 800 feet or 250 meters. Steeper runs reduce the error in the long axis significantly, but also reduce the line up time and increase risk from terrain etc.

Not sufficient for pinpoint fire at small targets, but perfectly adequate to put several of a salvo of a dozen rockets near the intended aim point. That is the typical firing amount, with a gunship making several passes to dump all its available rockets - though mixed loads (some Hellfire carried I mean) and Apaches typically mean you'd have 38 of the things (2x19 round pods).

[undead reindeer cavalry]

i think the modelling of dispersion in general is a bit off. these pixel soldiers have unbelievably bad aim, e.g. firing burst after burst in ground 30 meters in front of them. perhaps it has something to do with the inaccuracy of LOS-LOF checks, i don't know.

[Thomm]

Originally posted by undead reindeer cavalry:

... perhaps it has something to do with the inaccuracy of LOS-LOF checks, i don't know.

If this occured in uneven terrain then this is a very likely explanation!

It would be very cool if the bullets sent back "messages" (in IT terms) to the shooter if something like this happens, simulating that the shooter tracks his rounds and realizes that something is wrong!

Best regards,

Thomm

[Hev]

You want videos, ok

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=148_1192198601

This one you can actualy see the helo twisting left and right as the rockets leave the tubes, hes targeting a moving truck!

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=deb_1190641315

not all shots in this vid are rockets but the ones that are you can see how tight the group is compared to CM:SF

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=892_1173272856

now the last one is a little fuzzy but you can see cannon bursts and rockets coming in within a very tight area.

That enough for you

[JasonC]

Hev - most of those are actually 30mm cannon fire, not the rockets. Some of the single large explosions after crosshair shots are Hellfire. The 2.75 inch dumb rockets are the least accurate weapon the Apache carries, and meant for shrapnel effect and soft vehicle kills over a whole area. If you want to point-kill a single soft target you use the gun, and for a hard one you use Hellfire.

[Elmar Bijlsma]

I agree with JasonC those videos don't really show anything.

First video, you can't tell what weapon he uses to attack the vehicle, though I would reckon he used a Hellfire since it's the pilot requesting to 'kill his ass'. With the rockets the ball would be in his court, yes? After that, I see only 30mm.

Second video, near the start I see a Hellfire launched and seconds later land. After that I see a whole host of explosions, mostly 30mm, sometimes a rocket or missile but no telling what it was.

Third video. A little fuzzy? That's a very British understatement. Can't really tell what's happing aside from that this time it's really rockets (and 30mm) being fired. But it's nearly impossible to tell where they land.

Anyway, I've always had fair results from them, even on 'immidiate'. Certainly don't recognize the 2-3km accuracy.

[M1A1TC]

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=23b_1180473639

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=0b1_1180120212

[Abbott]

Originally posted by M1A1TankCommander:

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=23b_1180473639

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=0b1_1180120212

That was accurate fire.

[Elmar Bijlsma]

Uhm...

So I just went to test and had an Apache open up with rockets, scattering them a good kilometre across the map (in a remarkably straight line too) Yeah, that's not very good.

[adultery]

a kilometer?!? back in my day the stupid choppers landed the rockets over a 3km strip....and our dad used to murder us every night

[Peter Cairns]

Captain Adultery,

You were lucky, we were all dead before we were born and the rockets that done it were fired at the moon........

Peter.

['Card]

Originally posted by Captain Adultery:

seems to be absolutly worthless...

I find your lack of faith disturbing.

[Flanker15]

In a couple of the videos the apache cannon sounded like it was firing much faster than normal, are there apaches that mount different cannons?

[flamingknives]

The M230 (cannon on the Apache) is externally powered, so you ought to be able to chose firing rates.

[Thomm]

Originally posted by flamingknives:

The M230 (cannon on the Apache) is externally powered, so you ought to be able to chose firing rates.

When you blaze away at the enemies of freedom and democracy, do you not want to always use the highest freakin' rate possible?

Best regards,

Thomm

[Hev]

End of the day the apache (especialy in its newest iteration) is a multi million pound attack platform, designed during the cold war to operate in high threat invironments, day or nigh, and to deliver its payload against (presumably moving) high value armoured targets.

I think that would mean that an apache is capable of delivering the majority of its payload into a 50 or 100 meter square or even a single reasonably sized building (im not saying it would necessarily target the right building)

[YankeeDog]

The Hellfires and 30mm are for precision fires. The 2.75" rockets are for area saturation.

With that said, it's not like the unguided Hydra-70s are 19th Century Hale rockets or anything. Spreads over 1km+ are just silly. Even the Hydra-70's antecedent, the 1940s Mk. 40 FFAR, was more accurate than that. The only time you'd see spreads like that would be if the pilot were deliberately spreading the fire out in order to cover a wide target area.

You may not be able to hit a building with every rocket, but you should be pretty confident of getting at least one hit on a building out of a salvo, and decent pilot should be able to place the majority of the rockets within the same city block.

Also worth nothing that some of the Hydra-70's warheads now available have timed fuses for airbursts or bomblet dispersion. Obviously, these prevent drastic overshots as long as the pilot gets the range reasonably close to right. I don't know how widely deployed these warheads are, though.

There also several development programs looking to turn the Hydra-70 into a guided system out there. APKWS has been put on hold again I think, but AFAIK the Navy one is still ongoing.

To further back up the figures JasonC cites above, in a quick tour of what Google has to offer on the subject, I found this powerpoint presentation from NAVSEA. Note slide 8, which has a very nice graph of the dispersion of a Hydra-70 salvo in a real-world test.

Advanced Propulsion Concepts for the Hydra-70 Rocket System

Test is 38 rockets fired at a point target from a hover, at a range of 2000m. The 50% CEP is about 100m. To be sure, you would expect somewhat worse performance in combat conditions. But not 10 times worse.

Cheers,

YD

[ November 16, 2007, 02:58 PM: Message edited by: YankeeDog ]