UK/EU 155mm Shell Projects

JFC Fuller

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I mostly just have programme names for this and vague descriptions of things that were going on but thought it might be worthwhile to collect whatever info I can find on what seems to have been a particularly fruitless R&D effort.

Low Cost Guided Munition (LCGM): Seems to have come about in the late 1990s and was later subsumed into the ImpaQt consortium work

Lightweight Advanced Munition as part of the Advanced Ordnance Demonstrator programme: I suspect this was a follow on from the above but the idea was to use a composite airframe as the shell rather than steel thus saving considerable weight. Intended range was given as 75km, there were at least two variants, one unitary and one able to carry three BONUS sub-munitions. This was essentially the ImpaQt Mk2 shell design; ImpaQt Mk1 being the French Munition Portée Precision Accrué (MPPA) demonstrator which used a steel shell. Qinetiq claims a successful firing of the composite Advanced Ordnance Demonstrator in 2007. ImpaQt was aiming for 10m accuracy at 80km using combined inertial/GPS guidance.

All of this fell under a programme in the UK called Indirect Fire Precision Attack (IPFA) which outlasted the 155mm shell programmes even though it has never delivered anything other than a GMLRS procurement. The industrial work ended up as an international collaborative programme (ImpaQt) which fizzled out.

Attached PDF by Simon A. Colby (CORDA Ltd) and D. Lee Beetha (BAE Systems RO Defence) about the use of simulation to support the development of the LCGM and the associated Low Cost Course Corrected Munition (LC3M).
 

Attachments

  • Long Range Artillery Simulation.pdf
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