Sheridan Tank: Armored Reconnaissance/Airborne Assault Vehicle M551 Conduct of Fire 1969 US Army

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more at http://quickfound.net/links/military_news_and_links.html "Demonstrates the method of firing each of the weapons on the Sheridan tank, including the 50 cal and 7.62mm machine guns, 152mm gun/launcher, and grenade launchers." US Army training film TF17-4137 Reupload of a previously uploaded film, in one piece instead of multiple parts, and with improved video & sound. Public domain film from the US National Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied. The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M551_Sheridan The M551 Sheridan was a light tank developed by the United States and named after Civil War General Philip Sheridan. It was designed to be landed by parachute and to swim across rivers. It was armed with the technically advanced but troublesome M81/M81E1 152mm gun/launcher which fired conventional ammunition and the MGM-51 Shillelagh guided anti-tank missile. It entered U.S. Army service in 1967. Under the urging of General Creighton Abrams, the US Commander of Military Forces in Vietnam at the time, the M551 was rushed into combat service in Vietnam in January 1969. In April and August 1969, M551s were deployed to units in Europe and Korea, respectively.[2] Now retired from service, it saw extensive combat in Vietnam, and limited service in Operation Just Cause (Panama), and the Gulf War (Kuwait)... The vehicle designed to mount the gun had a steel turret and aluminum hull. Unfortunately, the armor was thin enough that it could be penetrated even by heavy machine gun rounds and when hit by an rocket propelled grenade the vehicle would "brew up" due to the main gun propellant being stored in cardboard tubes. Like the M113, it was also highly vulnerable to mines. Swimming capability was provided by a flotation screen, similar to that used by the World War II, amphibious DD Tanks. The front armor was overlain by a wooden "surfboard", actually three folded layers, hinged together. This could be opened up into a sloping vertical surface in front of the driver providing a bow of a boat hull, about level with the top of the turret. Fabric formed the rest of the water barrier, folding up from compartments lining the upper corner where the side met the top of the hull, and held up at the back with poles. The front of the "hull" was provided with a plastic window, but in practice it was found that water splashing onto it made this useless, and the driver instead had to take steering directions from the vehicle commander. The M2 Bradley would adopt a similar solution, but dropped it with upgraded armor. In the Vietnam War, firing the gun would often adversely affect the delicate electronics, which were at the early stages of the transition to solid state devices, so the missile and its guidance system was omitted from vehicles deployed to Vietnam. The expensive missile would end up almost never being fired in anger, despite a production run of 88,000 units... Production started on July 29, 1966, and it entered service in June 1967 with 1st Battalion, 63rd Armor Regiment at Fort Riley. In the end 1,662 M551s were built between 1966 and November 2, 1970. Total cost of the M551 program was $1.3 billion... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MGM-51_Shillelagh The Ford MGM-51 Shillelagh was an American anti-tank guided missile designed to be launched from a conventional gun (cannon). It was originally intended to be the medium-range portion of a short, medium, long-range system for armored fighting vehicles in the 1960s and '70s to defeat future armor without an excessively large gun. Developing a system that could fire both shells and missiles reliably proved complex and largely unworkable. It served most notably as a primary weapon of the M551 Sheridan light tank, but the missile system was not issued to units serving in Vietnam. Ultimately very few of the 88,000 rounds produced were ever fired in combat...