Why haven't top gunners been replaced by electronic turrets

Because you touch yourself at night.

>>32346497
Because you touch yourself when you think nobody's watching.

>>32346497
>what is CROWS

>>32346497
I dont know. Cheaper and better vision/situational awareness. Thats my guess.

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>>32346497
We already have those. Problems are that you can't easily reload them, you can't easily deal with any kind of jam or malfunction, you can only use whichever weapon is affixed to it, it requires power, and it takes up a lot of space inside the truck. They also further increase maintenance requires and needs for specialized parts and techs.

Modern full up turrets are already armored as shit too. Realistically, they won't be worried much about small arms, but about armor penetrating weapons, and those are going to go through the hull of the vehicle too, so it doesn't really matter.

CROWs systems are wonderful for giving expanded thermal camera coverage for a convoy, but you only need them on a vehicle or two, not on every single truck.

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>>32346550
Here is a modern manned turret. Extremely armored.

>>32346550
>but about armor penetrating weapons, and those are going to go through the hull of the vehicle too, so it doesn't really matter

I hadn't considered that. Thank you. I guess when you armour enough that that isn't a problem you might as well be driving around in an APC/tank.

>>32346497
As long as a few of us die, the enemy will keep fighting longer.

>>32346497
>Top Gunner
Turret Gunner if you please.

1. A man's cheaper
2. Less technology to rely on that goes bad
3. A man has more SA and can look around visually
4money

I saw Army vehicles with automated turrets. Marines aren't going to pay for that shit. It's going to be PFC schmuckatelli or Lcpl Doesn't Give a fuck for foreseeable future.

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>>32346580
>Muhreens have it harder
>Muhreens are too poor

Marines use CROWS too, senpai. Just because your particular unit doesn't use don't make it a universal truth.

>>32346560
What happens when you shoot a tire on that massive hulking hunk of metal?

>>32346675
The tires are reinforced. Truly thick as fuck and can take some light gunfire and frag. If you do penetrate, they are run flats. It won't be comfy, but they can still drive for quite a ways.

>>32346627
Maybe now. Never saw a single one on a marine vehicle overseas. But that was nearly 7 years ago now.

>>32346580
>Marines aren't going to pay for that

Fugg you, they use them just fine. But for the reasons stated above they're seeing limited use.

>>32346706
*Add: And even if the truck is mobility killed, it can act as a static base of fire for a long, long time. IIRC my last truck had something like 20,000 of linked 7.62mm ammo, probably 100 40mm grenades, a .50 rifle with a bunch of mags, a SMAW-D, and I literally don't know how much 5.56mm. And if that ran out we could just start hucking C4 and hand grenades out the sides.

>>32346839
This makes me moist.

I love knowing how much ammo military units have stowed on their vehicles and bases just because I like imagining literal piles of bullets and explosives.

Any vet anons wanna share their stockpile stories?

>>32346920
One time, I was in a multinational desert outpost, and one of the foreign militaries basically found a "lost" connex full of 40mm grenades that had somehow been lost in the shuffle for like a decade.

Due to being poorly stored and not check on, they were deemed hazardous and we had to blow them up. All of them. A literal shipping container's worth of 40mm laid out in the desert with a huge pile of of explosives on top of it.

>>32346712
>GWoT turned 15 this year.
Fuck I feel old now. I know there will be some salty sergeants that did a full 20 and won't even remember Gulf 1

Vision. Human eyes are so much better than remote cameras.

>>32346839
So basically a mobile pillbox.
Compared to HMMWV going into Iraq in 2003 vehicles have come a long way.

>>32346947
So is that like thousands of grenades?

Must have gone off like an airstrike or something.

>>32346497
Because even the best cameras don't give 100% faithful interpretations of a situation, like a human with a brain seeing it with his own eyes does.

Also,
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CROWS
We've had it on combat vehicles for 12 years.

>>32346968
Yeah. Big upgrade. Thermal cameras with flip down screens were standard for overseas when I got out, and that was a few years ago. Driving at night without having to wear NODs and with great situational awareness.

FBCB2s plugged into most TC seats with really good update times, and integration even from company level drones. Oh, company level drones are a thing.

>>32346963
You're baiting right?
When humans eyes stop being fatigued, can zoom in to 10x magnification, record actual data and can see in the infrared spectrum we'll talk.

because it's fucking expensive

>>32346675
Normal bullets? A whole lot of nothing.

They're compartmentalized and steel reinforced, specifically designed to be driven on long-term with holes in them. Pretty much the only way to really fuck a wheel on modern (US) combat vehicles is to either destroy the rim or completely wreck the tire with explosives. And even then, unless it causes a rollover (IE, at high speed or completely shredding every tire on one side only) they can still drive on the rims.

>>32346953
Yeah it hit me on my last deployment. When I looked at the kids age 5-7 I realized the war had been going on so long I bet none of them remember a time we didn't occupy them.

>>32346497
Beacuse niggers is cheaper

>>32347001
I mean movement and scanning. Remote cameras can't turn quickly, can't look back and forth between several spots if it's outside the camera's FOV. Unless you surround the turret in cameras but current remote turrets don't have that.

>>32346920
Sure. Former 82nd here.

In my gun truck (m240) in 2006 we had:
>4 LAW's
>4 full wirebound boxes of linked 7.62 4x1 plus a full wirebound of linked 7.62 SLAP
>60mm mortar with 20rds, collapsed
>1 AT4
>2 crates of m67 frag grenades
>6 cans (100rds each) linked 7.62 4x1 stored in the turret
>4 frag grenades stored in the turret
>4 cans of 5.56 linked
>6 wirebounds of 5.56 on stripper clips in bandoliers
>4 cans of 5.56 on stripper clips in bandoliers
>1 partial .30cal can of loose 9x19 with a couple loaded m9 mags in it (only the turret gunner got an m9)
>dozens of smoke grenades, every color of the rainbow
>cardboard box of misc. signalling rounds for the m203, white star, red star, red star parachute, etc (varied depending on what the TL dumped in there, usually around 40-45 rounds)
>12 buckshot rounds for the m203, stored in the turret in a homemade bandolier
>2 bandoliers of C4
>6 premade water-impulse charges
>somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 "door knocker" loops of detcord pre-rigged (varied depending on who was riding with me, there were a couple dudes in my platoon nobody trusted with those so if we got stuck with one of those guys they disappeared into pockets)
Plus the stretcher, 4 coils of concertina wire, and an assault ladder tied to the outside of the truck.

One of my fondest memories of Iraq was our gunner getting a purple smoke grenade stuck in the windshield wipers of a guy tailgating us. He got the message.

>>32347141
LAWs are absolutely wonderful weapons, and it makes me sad they have been phased out.

Perfect size and build for carrying in Afghanistan as a weapon to punch through heavy mud huts.

A close friend of mine used a Crows during a react to ambush in Afghanistan. If you follow ranging procedures you can guarantee a first round kill at a thousand meters. Probably more. Whatever range a .50 round goes transonic.

>>32347168
We loved them, but even in 2006 they were hard as fuck to come by.

I expect our ammo guys owed a LOT of favors to some CWO4 in some ASP somewhere for scaring them up for us, and we didn't waste them because we weren't sure we could get more.

>>32347141
I'm now curious to see now much this adds up to.
>26 cans of 7.62
That's 2600 rounds
>4 cans linked 5.56
That's 4000 rounds
>16 cans 5.56 on clips
13,440 rounds
>fucked up can of 9mm
I dunno, it varied but had at least a couple hundred in it.

So that's around 20,200 rounds of rifle/pistol/MG ammo in my truck, plus the explosives.

>>32347277
That's a whole lot of dakka.

>>32347524
Yep.

At the time we were expecting "heavy resistance" from trained foreign fighters, and were told that some of them had armored vehicles (hence the AT4 and the SLAP rounds). Worst I ever personally encountered was an ancient, immobile BRDM that'd been pulled into place by [something, probably a mule team] to be used as a disposable bunker/HMG emplacement during an ambush, and a ZU-23-2 we caught with its pants down that never fired a shot before someone LAW'd it.

We never even came remotely close to using all of any one version of ammo on the truck. I guess I had a pretty calm deployment for the time period.

>>32346497
1. guns need gun food
2. guns eat gun food fast
3. guy has to get out and shovel gun food to gun's spoon box
4. camera's and speakers don't translate sound very well when getting shot at and thick windows and bulletresistant doors tend to also dapen sound
5. guys like to hear the gun burp and bad guys crying like bitches in HD-sound not over wimpy speakers...

>>32347277
How many trucks did you roll out with on patrol?

Just so we can roughly estimate how much firepower one platoon had.

>>32346839
That's a MRAP, right?
Why not chuck the C4 underneath the hull to fling yourselves to safety?

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>>32346839
Don't forget small arms as well.
I remember one convoy I was in, the commander smuggled in a 100 round beta mag for his M16. Sure as shit we roll through a village on the MSR and start taking small arms fire. The convoy commander slows us all down, opens up his door and starts blasting on some hajis

>mfw I can say that I've been in a drive-by

>>32346839

LogPats dont count homeboy. 20K rounds of 7.62 is an INSANE amount of ammo for one truck. Heck, 5k rounds with all the other ammo and gear and shit makes for cramped quarters.

>>32346989
>Ravens

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>>32346550
They also give a far higher first-hit probability than manual shooting, telescopic sighting, stabilization...

And that's the CROWS II, which took the RWS of the Strykers, upgraded the optics (biggest being an integrated laser rangefinder instead of separate module), and replaced the smoke launchers with side armor. It also included an adapter kit for M240/249 in addiction to an M2 or Mk19.

>>32348791
It was a Cougar. Lots of interior space.

Basically one side of the rear was just ammo and weapons.

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>>32348970
We had RG-33 SOCOM Variants. Really nice trucks, doors can be operated by hand, on ours the roof hatches opened outward so you could Trunk Monkey four rifles if you needed to.

50 cal turret gunner here

>only a human can correct a stoppage or malfunction
>Humans reload faster
>gunner is the eyes and ears of the truck
>modern turrets are armored as fuk
>way, way too expensive and unreliable

Plus being a turret gunner is badass