A photo found at the Watervliet Arsenal museum shows the XM28 120mm recoilless gun with a warhead attached. Note, however, that while the XM28 is pretty much what was actually put into production and fielded, the warhead is entirely different to the actual M388 warhead. The actual warhead was somewhat football-shaped, while this is a simple finned cone/cylinder. The question thus is whether this was a preliminary design for the warhead, or instead was it simply a more or less random shape meant to stand in for the actual warhead. Work on the Davy Crockett at Watervliet focussed on the recoilless gun launching systems, not on the warhead (a LLNL product), and thus early on Watervliet may not have had access to a warhead or dummy warhead… and they may not have even been clued in on just what it looked like. If Watervliets staff did not know what the warhead looked like (they would not have had a Need To Know in order to work on the guns), they might have simply guessed in order to set up a display.
2 Responses to “Davy Crockett: Early Design?”
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U-235 gun assembly design in case the plutonium one couldn’t be made small enough or handle the launch G’s?
Our early nuclear artillery shell designs used U-235 and gun assembly IIRC.
Did you spot a strike enabling plug or rotary arming switch on any of the Davy Crockett warheads you saw?
Some of the video I found of it suggested that the arming and SEP stuff was on the launch control panel, not the warhead itself.
That is a non nuker spotting shell.