40mm Grenade Launchers

[JBLS]

From jb...@aol.com (JBLS)

I was reading a Technical Manual on the M203 Grenade launcher. It has a
section listing various ordnance available for it and their uses.
According to the manual, a, for example, M441 HE round arms itself about
2.4 meters from the barrel. How is the fuse designed so that it arms in
flight? Does it then detonate upon contact with the target or what?

John

[HorvathA]

From HorvathA <horv...@delphi.com>

Most artillery rounds arm themselves with a shear pin, that breaks
when the round starts spinning. I'm guessing that this is the same.
I'll also guess that it has a PD (point detonating) fuze, because
these are cheap.

Horvath
shove the whales

[Trenton R. Puckett]

From "Trenton R. Puckett" <vik...@delphi.com>

As I was told when we live fired the '203, the round does not arm until it
has completed a certain number of rotations after leaving the barrel, some
sort of inertia-arming device. It then detonates upon impact. Truly an
amzing weapon - I saw a GySgt hit a man-sized target at 200m, firing from
the hip! Hope this helps, Trenton.

[Frank Reid]

From re...@indiana.edu (Frank Reid)

2.4 meters wouldn't provide much safety in case the round hit a nearby
object! 24m maybe... Don't know the arming mechanism; it might be rotation
or pyrotechnic. Yes, they detonate on impact. I read about a guy
in Vietnam who got a 40mm grenade embedded in his back. The medics were
nervous because they couldn't tell if it was armed.

--

Frank re...@indiana.edu

[Curtis E Strain]

From cst...@helium.gas.uug.arizona.edu (Curtis E Strain)

A book I read: Bravo Two Zero, about a captured British SAS team during the
Gulf War has an interesting story about the inertial arming of an M203 round.
Seems that after one of the team was captured,his captors were playing around
with the launcher. It was still loaded, he tried to warn them, and it went
off inside a room. It hit the ceiling and came down w/o exploding, lucky for
the SAS guy! The author mentioned it had to go about 20 meters before
it armed itself, If my memory serves me right.
--
Curtis E. Strain cst...@bpa.arizona.edu

[Joseph Looney]

From jlo...@delphi.com (Joseph Looney)

In article <CzMou...@ranger.daytonoh.ncr.com>, jb...@aol.com (JBLS) writes:
>
> From jb...@aol.com (JBLS)
>
> I was reading a Technical Manual on the M203 Grenade launcher. It has a
> section listing various ordnance available for it and their uses.
> According to the manual, a, for example, M441 HE round arms itself about
> 2.4 meters from the barrel. How is the fuse designed so that it arms in
> flight? Does it then detonate upon contact with the target or what?

The fuse arms it's self after a set number of spins. In BCT they tell horror
stories of people tossing the unfired rounds around in the back of trucks and
arming the things. I don't know of any REAL cases of this happening, but it
is
possible.

After the round is armed it's supposed to go off on impact. They don't
allways. I have a friend who was/still is in EOD and she claims that M203
rounds are the round the EOD types hate the most, because they 1) fail the
most often and 2) are real damm touchy AFTER they fail.

I was rated on the M203, and fired about 15 rounds, (over the 3 years I was in
a unit that let/made every NCO be rated with all battery weapons) but was
never a "gunner" (ie the 203 was not my assigned weapon). Of those 15 round,
2 failed to go bang. NOTE: I was in a ADA unit C-2/1 ADA (Nike Herc) that
did NOT get a lot
of "small arms" ammo for training with and the ammo we did get was 8th ID
cast off's so our failure rate was a bit higher than a real "grunt" unit would
have had. I don't even want to talk about our .45 cal ammo :-)