*Quality

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by Mordhaus.

I remember seeing an A-10 at Oshkosh air show when I was pretty young (10-13?). The pilot told me about how the gun had to be offset from the centerline of the plane to keep the recoil from physically jarring the plane and screwing up flightpaths (though not as extreme as "causing the plane to stall" which was an early tall tale about the plane). Then he gave me a spent round from that very gun.

I still remember being impressed with both the plane itself, and that pilot.

the recoil force of the gau8 gatling gun firing is greater than what a single A-10 engine puts out! in practice however it only slows the plane down a few miles per hour ...

@kulpims - Yes, the physics of it suggest that even shooting fairly heavy depleted uranium shells at very high velocities at a fairly high rate of fire can't really put much of a dent in the momentum of a *very* heavy plane moving at a pretty high velocity.

Still, the pilot at the time told me in person (and some research I've done since then also suggests it may be true) that angling the gun off of perfectly straight alignment was deemed necessary due to shear forces that would require fairly dramatic pilot correction when firing the weapon.

Definitely nothing like dramatically slowing the airspeed of the plane, but I still found it impressive that the recoil of the gun became a design challenge even in such a large aircraft.

The firing barrel is on the centerline though. I believe the whole gun was offset to make room for the front landing gear.

As for the recoil: http://what-if.xkcd.com/21/

Why does he shoot off those $50/each flares

The A10 is just such an awesome piece of hardware.

And tell me if you were from any time before the 1900s and saw that thing you would not think it was a bloody dragon from myth (a giant flying beast that spits fire from its "mouth" and can totally destroy anything on land).

Perhaps some dude in the past saw a "vision" of it and that's how the dragon myth started? If you believe in that kind of thing