100+ years of US Army main service rifles
M1 Garand (1936-1959)
M14 (1959-1969)
M16A1 (1969-1986)
M16A2 w/ M203 (1986-2005)
M4A1 (2005-present)
The Most Awesome Men's Entertainment Site On The Internet
M1 Garand (1936-1959)
M14 (1959-1969)
M16A1 (1969-1986)
M16A2 w/ M203 (1986-2005)
M4A1 (2005-present)
The system is designed to counter short-range rockets and 155 mm artillery shells with a range of up to 70 kilometers. According to its manufacturer, Iron Dome will operate day and night, under adverse weather conditions, and can respond to multiple threats simultaneously.
The helmet shell combines Kevlar, the material used in bulletproof vests, and carbon-fiber cloth, formed by applying resin under high heat to a synthetic fiber. The checkerboard pattern comes from a plain weave of the carbon fiber interlaced at 90-degree angles to form a product that is ultralight – 4.8 pounds – and 50 times stronger than carbon steel. The helmet’s polycarbonate visor protrudes like a light bulb, but the shell is otherwise more streamlined than previous helmets and integrates features such as night-vision goggles, which once required fixing separate hardware to an external attachment point. The helmet’s foam inner shell requires at least four hours of custom fitting to each pilot before it’s cut by laser; the precision ensures that its eye tracking and visor display stay aligned even during high-G maneuvers.
The GAU-8 Avenger fires up to sixty one-pound bullets a second. It produces almost five tons of recoil force, which is crazy considering that it’s mounted in a type of plane (the A-10 “Warthog”) whose two engines produce only four tons of thrust each. If you put two of them in one aircraft, and fired both guns forward while opening up the throttle, the guns would win and you’d accelerate backward. To put it another way: If I mounted a GAU-8 on my car, put the car in neutral, and started firing backward from a standstill, I would be breaking the interstate speed limit in less than three seconds. (source)