If, like me, you can’t decide which ammunition to load into your chain gun, Northrop Grumman has a variant of its 30 x 113mm M230 Link Fed (M230LF) Dual Feed Bushmaster Chain Gun that can swap from one ammo to another at the flip of a switch.
If you’ve watched enough old war movies, you’ve certainly seen an episode where anti-aircraft fire is racking the sky, sending streaks of light upward that look like something from a Star Wars blaster. These are tracer rounds. The idea behind them is that these brightly-burning rounds are loaded into the ammo feed at intervals of four-to-one with the more lethal ones so that the gunner can see where the spray of shot is flying.
It’s a system that’s still used today, especially in machine guns carried on battle tanks, but it also illustrates a common, and often wasteful practice that the military employs out of necessity. Very often, a gunner isn’t sure about exactly which ammunition will be needed on a particular mission, so erring on the side of caution means loading up with more than one kind in the feed belt, just in case an armor-piercing round is needed instead of shrapnel.
According to Northrop Grumman, the new M230 gets around this conundrum by, for the first time, giving the gunner the ability to shift between two ammo belts by means of a single switch. In this case, XM1211 proximity fused rounds for combating drones and XM1198 high explosive, dual purpose rounds for countering armored targets.
M230
The advantage of this example is obvious. An anti-drone round won’t have much impact on a tank and an anti-tank round would be like trying to hunt ducks with a cannon. This not only means that the right rounds are available for the right job, it also means that there’s less waste, missions can last much longer, and the logistics for supplying ammunition are simplified.
In addition, the new M230 is based on the Bushmaster chain gun that Northrop Grumman has been making for decades for a wide variety of platforms. The company claims that the new gun, despite its dual feed, has 60% commonality when it comes to parts with other variants, allowing faster repairs.
“The M230LF Dual Feed Bushmaster Chain Gun offers new flexibility by switching between ammunition paths using dual-feed technology,” said Dave Fine, vice president, armament systems, Northrop Grumman. “Using advanced technology combined with five decades of battle-proven experience, this next-generation cannon will empower operators to quickly respond to threats. This chain gun is the latest in our Bushmaster line to deliver reliable, multi-mission capabilities addressing the evolving threat environment.”
Source: Northrop Grumman
