Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Army positioned to save tens of millions of dollars with new mobile cannon system!

The FCS Non-Line-Of-Sight cannon will help the military not only in lethality,
deployability, and protection but also in fuel savings. Below is a link that
shows the specs of the vehicle that the new cannon system is replacing.



Cruise Range 186 miles
Fuel Capacity 133 gallons

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ground/m109-specs.htm

This is the link for the NLOS-C that is replacing the Paladin
Range
30 km/20 miles (objective)
30 km system demonstrator

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ground/fcs-nlos-specs.htm


Assuming all of the Paladins are replaced fuel savings could be as high as 24.5 million dollars in four years. My fuel savings calculations come from assumptions, that once I find the data I will hopefully back up. The Paladin has a fuel efficency of about 1.5 miles per gallon assuming every paladin drives 2500 miles yearly, the cost would be 26,664,000 dollars. The NLOS-C vehicle on the other hand has a fuel effiency of 20 miles per gallon, assuming the same amount of driving the costs would add up to 2 million dollars. And this is just for one vehicle! Every vehicle in the FCS Combat Vehicle Program will have a hybrid electric drive system, and those vehicles will be lighter then the cannon, so one could expect greater fuel savings with those vehicles. Another thing that adds to those vehicles potential efficiencies is that battery technology will be much improved by then and they are coming out later then the NLOS-C vehicle therefore lessons learned from the NLOS-C vehicle might go to improvements in the latter released vehicles. And yet another factor that adds to more fuel savings is that a lot of the other vehicles will be procured in greater amounts then the NLOS-C and most likely will have higher op tempos resulting in more fuel savings because they drive more miles per year. I will try and get some more info on the fuel effiency of the other vehicles to see what savings we can expect.

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