XBradTC

I’ll admit I didn’t actually know these existed.

One of the challenges when training people in the Army (or Marines) is getting them over the “buck fever” of the first time they launch a man portable missile.  In my day, it was the M47 Dragon anti-tank guided missile.  The Dragon launch environment was, well, energetic, as it were. The Semi-Automatic Command to Line of Sight (SACLOS) guidance system was very sensitive to even the smallest movement of the launcher. Combine that with the loud blast of the launch motor, and the significant shift in weight as the missile left the tube, it was very easy for a first time shooter to accidentally guide the missile right into the ground almost immediately. And since guided missiles are pretty dang expensive, you can never afford to do nearly as many live fire exercises as you might wish. And so simulators and training aids of various types are used to train up troops prior to any live fire.

The Dragon, interestingly, had not one, but two different launch trainers. One had a chamber in the back that accepted a grenade launcher round of 7.62mm caliber (kind of like a superpowered blank round, used to fire rifle grenades from the M14). When it fired, it shifted a weight inside the trainer, that simulated the shift a gunner would feel on a real shot. The trainer was connected to an analog computer that measured how well the gunner tracked a special IR emitting target board for 10 seconds. It was surprisingly hard to do well.

But let’s face it, no 7.62mm round is going to accurately simulate a missile launch. And so there was another tracking/launch effect simulator. It wasn’t used as much, as it was much more complicated, but it was very, very good at simulating the launch environment.

The other LES looked like an empty missile tube. Frangible paper/fiber discs were used to close off the ends of the tube.  Then a careful mixture of MAP gas and oxygen were pumped into the tube. When the gunner squeezed the trigger, a spark plug ignited the gas. Now, I don’t know how much you know about MAP gas, but a wee bit of that and some pure oxygen burns pretty damn fast. Like, virtually instantaneously. The explosion would render the paper/fiber discs to mere confetti, and the gunner was treated to an environment with a whole lot of noise and flame. In fact, the MAP-LES was actually something more energetic than launching an actual Dragon. If you could fire it accurately, the real deal wasn’t a big issue.