Best man-mobile and low tech AA-gun?

I would vote for 20mm Oerlikon guns or 37mm German AA gun on any chasis according to experiences of the allied fighter and fighter-bomber pilots (if you read Pierre Clostermann's Grand circus, you can find an answer).

 

I agree with moonchild the 2 guns where lighweight and had a preaty good punch in them
:bang:

 

Without a doubt the best and lowest technology man portable AA weapon is a leather sling.
Spanish sheperds have practice in shooting down helicopters that bother their sheep with a single stone (happened at least twice, one of them back in 88 i think).
:lol:

 

Yup, of all projectile weapons the slinger is possibly the one with the most lasting potency, and also the most unexpected to be that...

During the Spanish conquests of South America, the only foe the conquistadores really feared were the enemy slingers. Their projectiles were just about as powerful as the European musket shot!

 

While slingers are useful (and cheap!) missile troops, I rather doubt that last statement of yours Roel. Could a stone from a sling really penetrate hardened steel armour?

 

Hm, probably not, but it was as effective in stopping cavalry charges and mowing down infantry (if not covered with hardened steel armour). Also it had a higher rate of fire than the muskets and didn't require any resource (saltpeter ran out in the Americas, forcing the conquistadores to make their own inferior stuff).

 

No arguments with that statement.

 

Yay! I beat the pedantic man! Beer's on me!

 

I even read of a F4 shot but not donwed by a spanish sheperd in the USA

 

Spanish slingers were renowned for their lethal acuracy as far as the Carthaginian wars-During the Spanish Civil War the reds brought some slingers into Toledo, to hurl sticks of dynamite at the besieged Alcazar..

"Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer" Vito Corleone to his son Michael

 

The shoulder fire arms the "Conquistadores" brought to the Americas were not muskets, but an earlier ancstor of the musket known as an "arquebus"- which was considerably heavier Most English-language translations of the Spanish Conquest of the Americas used the term "musket", instead of "arquebus" . As you rightly point out, the rate of fire of the arquebus was slow..something the willy natives soon realized. When the Spaniards reached what is now Paraguay, after the first initial clashes, the Guarani Indians worked out a method to overcome the arquebusiers..As soon as the Spaniards aimed their weapons, the Indians crouched, and when they fired the flung themselves to the ground. While the arquebusiers were reloading, the Guarani struck back with a shower of arros and spears-but they were driven back by effective sword-play and crossbows. In fact the crossbows were more numerous at this stage of the coquest than arquebuses. We see this in the chronicles of Bernal Diaz del Castillo: for "" Pedro de Alvarado went inland to explore the nearby village.....He took with him a hundred soldiers, including 15 with crossbows and six with muskets..."

"He (Cortes) sent Gnozalo de Sandoval, the chief constable and chief of his expedition, a brave man with a good head. He took with him two hundred soldiers, twenty horsemen, a dozen crossbowmen.."

The Bernal Diaz Chronicles: The True Story of the Conquest of Mexico (translated and edited by Albert Idell (Doubleday and Co, Garden City, New York, 1956) pp.136-40, 272 .
Salpeter, suplhur anc coal are abundant in both Mexico and the Andean regions of South America-so l do not imagine that the Spaniards suffered from such shortages as you mentioned.

 

In that time, main infantry weapon was still the pyke or the alabarda (a kind of polearm marking it's wielder as a NCO). In formation it was very difficult and dangerous to close hand to hand, and then there were the fine sword blades from Toledo.

In the Spanish Civil War, many country people knew how to use a sling (my cousin of 32 grew up using one), and you can see many scenes of soldiers from both sides using them to throw grenades.

I heard Benjamin Franklin proposed to arm first american militias with bows because they were more precise and had longer range than muskets.
Is this true?

 

In English the "alabarda" is called a halberd. .According to Webster's Dictionary is :" a weapon of the 15th and 16th centuries, consisting of a battle -ax or a pike mounted on a handle about six feet long". As far as the slingshots, while traversing through Spain and Portugal, l recall seing shepherds using yhem to protect their herds..

 

Halberds, when first introduced in the united kingdoms of Castilla and Aragon, was designated by Queen Isabel la Catolica as the rank badge of a new military class, the professional sargents.
When thir grandson Charles (1st of Spain, 5th of Germany) was king it was widespread through infantry formations, but i don't know if it was still restricted to NCOs or by standard german practice issued generally.

Of course, historians don't agree where it comes from, because there are many variations over the "long handle with a spear point and axe head at one end". Most logical i know is the one giving the halberd a Swiss/centroeuropean origin, from the german "Hallenbarte"...

But being this a forum about WWII, i think i'll leave it at that

 

The chief weapon of the conquistadores was not the handgun or the aruqebus, as you mentioned, but steel. Steel swords were infinitely more efective than local slashing and stabbing weapons; steel armour could resist most of the enemy's projectile weaponry at range; steel pikes and halbers could slash through almost anything at ranges where the enemy could hardly touch the Spaniards. However, here we were simply discussing the effectiveness of a sling vs that of a firearm of the period.

Muskets became the standard halfway down the sixteenth century, and fro then on developed to be a weapon of much greater effect and range than any other projectile weapon, especially when used in bunches and by soldiers marching in step (using tactics invented by Maurice of Orange and first used in 1600).

Going back the the conquistadores, according to the historian J. F. Guilmartin Jr the Spaniards really did run out of saltpeter in the middle of their conquests, possibly because the rich sources you mention hadn't been discovered yet or weren't actively searched for. In any case, the superiority of the Spanish armies in the Americas laid in their tactics. They were able to use pikes, swords, guns and crossbows as well as light cavalry together so well that the native Americans never really got a chance to disperse the Spaniards and thus defeat them. The claim has been made that any Spanish force of as few as fifty men of all kinds could hold off any enemy number of Americans at the time.

 

[The chief weapon of the conquistadores was not the handgun or the aruqebus, as you mentioned,
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I thought the quote from Bernal Diaz del Castillo made it abundantly clear that arquebuses were rather rare amoing the Conquistadorews-so were horses-Cortes only had 20 re so in his first expedition..The Aztecs were shocked, because they took rider and horse to be one single supernatural being....What work by Gillmartin are you citing?..Bernal Diaz's chronicles are the most compelling account of the conquest of Mexico bar none..because he witnessed it first hand...

 

Like I said, it wasn't their chief weapon. I didn't say it was, in fact I never did. This whole conversation started because I mentioned the slingers the Americans used as being as effective as the firearms brought by the Spaniards.

The work I was referring to is J. F. Guilmartin, Jr., "The Military revolution, origins and first test abroad". It is an essay published in C. J. Rogers, "The military revolution debate: readings on the military transformation of early modern Europe" (299-333).

 

Neither did l..thanks for the reference...