Armor: June 24, 2000

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The Franco-British CTA consortium has confirmed that it is manufacturing a 40mm Case Telescoped cannon for each of the teams competing in the US-British TRACER program to build a new scout vehicle. Case-telescoped weapons have the projectile completely inside the cartridge case. After the round is in the chamber and is fired, a small charge pushes the projectile into the barrel a fraction of a second before the main propellant charge ignites. This system allows fairly powerful guns to be built in fairly confined spaces at the cost of more expensive ammunition. Because the ammunition is cylindrical rather than bottle-shaped, the larger caliber shells do not take any more room than smaller caliber conventional ammo. In the first test of the CTA 40mm CTWS cannon, it was fitted to a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, replacing the 25mm chaingun in only four hours. The cannon worked quite well from that vehicle, and there is some thought to upgrading the Bradley in the future with a more powerful weapon (perhaps of this type).--Stephen V Cole


 

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