Gun pod

A gun pod is a detachable pod or pack containing machine guns, autocannons, revolver cannons, or rotary cannons and ancillaries, mounted externally on a vehicle such as a military aircraft which may or may not also have its own guns. A gun pod typically contains one or more guns, a supply of ammunition, and, if necessary, a power source. Electrically powered cannon, such as the M61 Vulcan, may be powered from the aircraft's electrical system or by a ram-air turbine. Gun pods increase a vehicle's firepower without occupying internal volume. When not required for a specific mission they can be omitted to save weight. On some vehicles they isolate delicate internal components such as radar from the weapon's recoil and gases, and for jet aircraft allow the weapons to be mounted away from the intakes of the engines, reducing problems of gun-gas ingestion, which may cause the engine to stall. When designed to be suspension-mounted on a hardpoint on a typical post-WW II aircraft, gun pods are inherently less accurate than integral guns, or the type of "conformal" gun pods that are faired smoothly into or onto the nearby surfaces of an aircraft, because the "hardpoint" mounting is necessarily less rigid, so that the weapon's recoil produces more deflection. This problem is particularly acute with powerful cannon like the 30mm GPU-5 gun pod. Both hardpoint-mounted and conformal-mount gun pods also cause substantial drag on fast-moving vehicles such as fighter aircraft. Gun pods are commonly carried on military helicopters, and are often fitted to light aircraft to equip them for counter-insurgency operations. Some air arms use gun pods for fighter bombers for use in strafing attacks. Since the Vietnam War, United States Air Force policy has been that the use of multimillion-dollar aircraft for strafing is not economically justified, but the Soviet Union, and subsequently Russia, have remained proponents of strafing, and have continued to develop systems for this purpose.