(I coulda *swore* I posted this years ago, but I went looking for it and couldn’t find it. Either way, behold…)
The Lacroix Samouraï Urban Warfare (SUW) “High Impulse Weapon System” is sort of a shoulder-fired 76mm mortar. Normally that would not only knock you down, it’d rip your shoulder off, but the HIWS uses frictional damping to reduce felt recoil… the barrel and chamber slide aft 600 mm. The same energy is imparted to the shooter, but it’s spread out over time, giving the shooter a chance to absorb the recoil and remain standing.
The finned, unpowered projectile weighs about 3 pounds and can carry 0.65 pounds worth of explosive 300 to 400 meters downrange.
This video was from 2006 or so, and I haven’t heard anything about it since. It was developed a dozen years ago by Lacroix Defense & Security, and FN Herstal tried to market it in the US as the HIWS-76, but I’ve not heard anything since the 2006 demo.
[youtube 9nOkO8Sh2xs]
It should be akin in weapon potential to a similarly-sized recoilless rifle or rocket propelled grenade, but with no risk of back-blast. It would thus be safer to operate, as well as probably being somewhat stealthier (you launch a rocket, everybody with eyes can tell where it came from). You could use the HIWS from within a vehicle or structure (shooting through an open window, of course) without killing everyone in the room.Just the sort of thing for when the Judges are otherwise busy and Block War breaks out…
But the launcher itself is pretty heavy (17 or so pounds), and likely expensive. That would be its big problem… hard to economically compete against anti-tank rockets that are shoulder-fired from disposable fiberglass tubes.
