British light infantry

[captainsmirk]

My point was that they felt the need for a replacement, the Javelin, they produced that replacement. That is undisputable fact, they replaced Blowpipe with Javelin. You can argue as to why they did that, but if Blowpipe was satisfactory then there would have been no need to replace it after such short period of time.

And there were no hand held SAMs in Korea, so it was obviously more advanced than the weapons used there...
I think the US had Redeye during the Vietnam period, which uses the same basic system of operation as the Stinger, just all-aspect.


Nick

 

[CorranP90]

lol u took everythin i jus said in completely the wrong way wot i was getin at with the blowpipe was that it wasnt a bad weapon jus had its problems. an every weapon get replaced at some point. wasnt denying the fact it was replaced with javelin which it self is due to be replaced. it missed 90 out of 100 times due to it bein used in wrong roll which was engaging every plane it came across when it was only designed as last resort defense agaisnt attackin planes and was all but useless against planes flying by as the human eye really cant track somethin traveling at speeds that break the sound barrier. even the javelin cant be used to shoot down passing planes as its primary roll is to take out attacking(head on attacks with little deviation) planes or choppers. blowpipe was so old it had a very "dumb" missile as its only tracking capabilities was that provided by the user jus like experimental missiles used by germany in ww2 an used by US in korea but only as an experiment. that was wot i meant by korea an as for vietnam part i was goin on bout how back then they had missiles that were fire an forget an were packed full of tech yet many of those missiles failed to detonate or even track anythin so most weapons of 70s early 80s were fickle at best so for the time 9 out of a 100 for weapon used in wrong role was actually quite good considerin but ofcourse modern weapons wud do far better but even then ur lucky to get a hit half the time. jus look at that instance in iraq 6 years ago wen US sams targeted a brit tornado it took them several missiles to finally shoot it down an 2 years ago wen the sams defending washington targeted storm clouds lol so even modern aa missiles fail to hit alot of the time

 

[captainsmirk]

Yeah, sorry, that came out a little snappier than I intended.
However, it seems generally accepted that Blowpipe wasn't up to the job for which it was intended, and was replaced with a series of improvements on the basaic design, each effectively adding more and more automatic control in place of direct user control.

The main problem I think was that Blowpipe required the operator to guide the missile onto the target by eye. This could be fairly time consuming, which with a fast low flying target was bascially fatal. Javelin was designed so that the operator only had to keep the target in sight and the missile homed in on what he was looking at, rather than having to watch both the missile and target and bringing the missile to where the target was himself.


Nick