I flew along as "guest door gunner" on two helo flights. One with M-60s and one with a mini-gun. Got a chance to hose bad guys both times. The mini is a much better hose! Also, on both missions, the real door gunner took back over when things got overly warm. I did okay, but he was the pro.
One of the curiosities about minis and Cobras was left out of the video. Standard armament for the nose turret was a mini and a 40mm grenade gun. Brrrrt vs cachunk, cachunk, cachunk...boom, boom, boom. The grenade launcher was not a terribly popular system for most Snake pilots. They were not accurate and, well, they had lots of rockets that were, and delivered much larger "Booms!"
So one wizard decided to mount two minis in the nose turret. Brrrrt^2 it was. Only problem was that if they were fired to the side the recoil impulse was sufficient to keep the bird from rolling in on a rocket run. OTOH, there were different styles of standard armament for the Cav snakes when I arrived on the first tour. There were two "Hog" versions, a light one had a pair of 19 and a pair of 7 tube rocket pods on the wing stubs. The heavy Hog had four 19 tube pods. Then there was the light Scout version with two 7 tube pods and a pair of minigun pods on the stubs, and the heavy version with 2 minis and 2 19 tube pods. Short version, the Scout variants could and did carry 4 miniguns. The rain of hell from those beasts was rather remarkable, to say the least.
Late in the first tour a few of our birds were equipped with a 3 barreled 20mm Vulcan variant, wing stub mounted. Early on the pilots hated them for several reasons, the most obvious being the muzzle blast tended to open their cockpit hinged access doors/windows. That can be rather disconcerting when in a dive at 190 knots.
I am..........disturbed.
Concerning the difference between man and the jackass: some observers hold that there isn't any. But this wrongs the jackass. -Twain
