ARBALIST

The main drawback of recoilless guns in the American arsenal was the low initial speed of the shells and grenades, which made it almost useless to fire at moving targets at a distance of effective firing range , which in turn created the need for accurate means of determining the range to the target or required high personal skill from the shooter : In the summer of 1964, the head of the missile forces department, Major General John Zirdt, set the task of developing effective weapons against tanks and other armored targets at ranges exceeding the distance to the visible horizon , or alternative means for them to be used within the visible sector of the shelling, but having such properties that would distinguish them from existing analogues ^[6] . Based on these considerations, the developers of “Arbalista” were instructed by the Douglas company to develop a rocket launcher similar in design to a recoilless gun, but using an armor-piercing kinetic damaging element with a solid metal rod inside and a hypersonic flight speed instead of a cumulative effect ^{[1 ] [5]} . The task was simplified by the fact that under the guidance of specialists from the U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory and Redstone Arsenal officers, a program was developed to develop armament models with a hypersonic direct-fire antitank weapon , presented by several competing projects. The basis of these projects was branches from the Sprint- type missile defense development program (in which Douglas participated among other applicants), ^[8] therefore they all had approximately the same device and operating principle ^[6] (for example, a similar aerodynamic rocket layout with other mass and dimensional characteristics, it was previously implemented in the Thunderstick universal anti-tank anti-aircraft missile project developed by American Rocket in 1961, as well as in the Viper anti-tank missile defense project from Lock hid aircraft "). The conical layout of the rocket did not suggest the presence of plumage , the length of the rocket corresponded to the length of the launch tube ^[5] . For the “Arbalista” missile, the Tiokol company specially synthesized high-burning fuel grades ^{[6] [9]} . Initially, a rocket launcher with a launching device was a shoulder-launched weapon carried by one shooter, worn on a belt behind his back, on his shoulder or in his hand when in a stowed position. To verify the principal feasibility and effectiveness of this type of weapon as part of factory tests at Douglas’s own shooting range, which meets the requirements for testing hypersonic missiles, ^[10] and proving grounds at the Aberdeen test site with fixed launch tubes (in the absence of people at the firing range ) thirty rockets were fired. Tests have shown the feasibility of the design plan and the excellent prospect of eliminating the discovered shortcomings and further refinement of the backlog ^[5] . The people associated with the program took the shooting results with great enthusiasm: according to their assessment, given in the test reports and leaked to the press, the missiles showed predictable, regular, and therefore calculated deviations from the line of sight ^[6] . The penetrating ability of the striking element exceeded the calculated parameters. At a flight speed exceeding five thousand feet per second, the missile hit targets in the near zone of the shelling sector of the defended position (at a distance of up to four hundred yards) in no time, which did not create a difference for the shooter between the shelling of moving targets and stationary objects ^[11] . However, the flight speed of the rocket created both advantages and disadvantages, because due to the high speed a different plan arose - in proportion to the increase in the flight speed of the rocket, the deviation of the rocket from the flight path increased significantly. Even a slight deviation received by the rocket as a result of the influence of any factors, both external (speed and direction of the wind) and internal (imperfect parameters of the shape of the cone and the direction of exit of the jet), increased exponentially after four hundred yards. Therefore, if there were no doubts regarding the penetrating ability of the striking element, then in terms of accuracy of firing at the range of visibility of enemy armored objects, the results of firing in the words of the British military historian, Colonel John Wicks were “alarming”: None of the missiles fired during factory tests flew strictly along the line of sight of the target being fired (that is, along a straight path), the deviation amplitude was different, some missiles deviated from the line of sight in an excessively curvilinear trajectories , almost all flew in one direction or another beyond the limits of a given shelling sector. In Douglas, they proposed to equip the launching device with a lightweight tripod machine to increase the accuracy of the aiming, but this did not solve another problem related to the design of the rocket, namely: the flight of a deadly hot jet stream over the firing position and several feet deep and to the side, which was so destructive in its effect on the terrain and objects that not a single person would have survived after the shot of the “Arbalist”, but if there were various constructive moves from the spread of the jet, it was tested Even during the interwar period , by supplementing the construction with various kinds of protective shields and reflectors, the noise level during the launch was so deafening that no hearing protection ensured that the shooter was protected from the risk of deafening or contusion, together with serious hearing damage, - this factor, according to J. Wicks, became decisive in “killing” the “Arbalist” project once and for all, despite the encouraging results of firing in terms of pure combat effectiveness , without taking into account the numerical limiting factors ^[12] . Senior Pentagon military officials said they were no longer interested in the program (which included a number of other projects similar to Arbalist but carried out by other companies) and its further funding was discontinued. Among the reasons for curtailing the program were named universal for all prototypes of this type of reason: Safety of using weapons directly for the shooter and the destructive effect on the launching device. Nevertheless, officials in the Office of the Chief of Research of the U.S. Army did not see any unrecoverable deficiencies among them (they estimated that it could be achieved through the development and use of less high-calorie types of fuel). ^[6]

The rocket launcher was a removable reusable launcher with a docking machine or without it and a rocket in a disposable launch tube. The missile was an unsupported oblong cone stabilized by its own rotation, to fill the void between the walls of the bore and tapering towards the tip of the body, the missile in the launch tube was covered with styrofoam (styrene foam) overlays, which acted as a buffer to reflect expanding gases in the bore in the opposite direction direction of fire and preventing the breakthrough of gases forward. The pads were separated from the rocket at the exit of the launch tube and, under the influence of air resistance, scattered to the sides. According to the engineer of the Tiokol company Bill Colburn, who participated in the creation of the rocket, the rotational speed of the rocket around its axis was so high that sometimes the thin body of the rocket could not withstand the longitudinal load created by centrifugal forces and burst leading to the destruction of the rocket in flight ^[2] .

Source of information: ^{[2] [6] [11]}

• Mobility Category - Wearable
• Method of shooting - from the shoulder or from the machine
• Aerodynamic layout - unframed bearing cone
• Type of rocket engine - solid propellant
• Rocket fuel combustion rate - approx. 12.7 mm / s (0.5 ")
• Type of warhead - armor-piercing with a metal core rod type
• Armor-piercing Rod Material - Tungsten Carbide Alloy
• Missile length - approx. 1220 mm (4 ')
• The diameter of the rocket at the base of the cone is approx. 100 mm (4 ")
• The diameter of the rocket in the middle of the cone is 50 mm (2 ")
• The initial flight speed of a rocket at a departure from a launch tube is St. 1550 m / s (5000 '+)
• Guaranteed hit range - 365 m

The results obtained during the work on the “Arbalist” were used in the future, during the development of the D-Si-Mo complex with a missile equipped with a gyroscopically stabilized inertial navigation system ^[13] . In the second half of the 1960s, on the basis of existing developments in the army test facilities, a project for a two-stage hypersonic missile with a kinetic striking element called " Action " was developed, which was also intended to equip the ground forces, which showed less danger for the shooter and more accuracy than Arbalist at comparable speeds. Despite the fact that neither Arbalist nor Action were adopted, they laid the foundation for development in the mid-1980s. another miniature hypersonic anti-tank missile - “ Spike ”, developed by the US Army Missile Weapons Laboratory, which combined accuracy with the killer and cheapness of its predecessors ^[1] .

• ARBALIST File of 1962. - National Archives and Records Administration, Langley Research Center Records, Record Group No. 255 (RG 255). - Entry 1 - Box 1 - Location D-08-04-01-1.
• Letson, K .; Burleson, W .; Eppes, R .; Pundt, D. Convective Heating Rates on Blunt Nose Cones. - Redstone Arsenal, Ala .: US Army Missile Command, Structures and Mechanics Laboratory, February 1962.
• Bigger, J. Preliminary Analysis of ARBALIST (Internal Report). - Santa Monica, Calif .: Douglas Aircraft Company, July 1962.
• Eppes, R .; Smith, S. Some Preliminary Aerodynamic Heating Considerations for a Sea-level Hypervelocity Antitank Vehicle. - Redstone Arsenal, Ala .: US Army Missile Command, Structures and Mechanics Laboratory, October 22, 1962. - Pt. I - (RS-TN-62-9).
• Eppes, R .; Smith, S. Some Preliminary Aerodynamic Heating Considerations for a Sea-level Hypervelocity Antitank Vehicle. - Redstone Arsenal, Ala .: US Army Missile Command, Structures and Mechanics Laboratory, November 6, 1962. - Pt. II - (RS-TN-62-5).
• Components Development and System Feasibility Program of a Hypervelocity Antitank Rocket. Progress Report No. 1.- Redstone Arsenal, Ala .: US Army Missile Command, 30 October 1962.
• Components Development and System Feasibility Program of a Hypervelocity Antitank Rocket. Progress Report No. 2. - Redstone Arsenal, Ala .: US Army Missile Command, 4 December 1962.
• Brogan, JL ARBALIST Progress Report (Confidential Report) . - Santa Monica, Calif .: Douglas Aircraft Company, 17 July 1964. - (E250-AN-3022)
• Weeks, John S. Men Against Tanks: A History of Anti-Tank Warfare . - N. Y .: Mason / Charter Publishers, Inc., 1975 .-- 192 p.