Biggest problem, IMO, with DIVAD, wasn't any of the usually mentioned ones, it was that the turret was put on a M48 chassis for saving money. A bit hard to protect units you can't follow. Putting the turret on a more mobile chassis would solve this nicely.
Actually, there are three problems with the York: Bad Chassis (the M48 was a bad idea, to begin with, they should have gone with the M60s that were being phased out of service), worn the shit out guns (from what the inquiry about it all found out that the barrels that the program procured were already well worn the shit out... kept in storage by some bean counter whose name is likely lost to time who didn't want to throw them to the scrap heap and order a few dozen more), bad hydraulics (they were using 3k PSI units instead of the required 5k units, the surprising thing was that the next test version was going to be fitted with 5k PSI hydraulic units), and a buggy and overly sensitive fire control/radar setup.
The helicopter (and one A-10) pilots that went against it in camera testing
absolutely dreaded fighting that thing. The fire control system and radar would almost instantly pick them up, train the guns to the fire order, then just
annihilate them. 40mm HEPF shells are
no joke. They had to
tone down the turret traverse because the turret would spin like a top at such speeds that the turret crew would get sick.
The only successes in camera testing was when one helicopter pilot exploited the hydraulics and forced them into a fail-state (i.e. he would zip around in such a way that it would be forced to lower its guns, traverse to the new heading, then raise the guns again... at such a speed that the hydraulics were unable to cope with the stresses involved and break down).
I have a thread about the York on this forum...
That's it kids thanks to good old ROB wankery you now get the final say in weapons procurment. All the weapons that were picked are still in service but you get to add smaller numbers of a passed over project. And you have the political and financial power to make it stick. What platform would you pick to see full production? I will start it off.
The Super Tomcat.
If the Super Hornet hadn't been built, Grumman's next-gen Tomcat may have become a reality. We forensically recreated it in these awesome renderings.
www.thedrive.com
I would make sure that at least on Airwing of these were on every US Carrier.
The F-14s were infamously hanger queens with infamously crap sortie rates. Now having a new interceptor using the F-14's history as a basis of what works and what doesn't would be an acceptable trade.
I wrote a "what if" article on that system for my WW3 fic.
CurtisLemay, a few others and myself brainstormed it and ended up putting the system on a modified M60 tank chassis with upgraded modern Bofors 40mm autocannons (not the surplus leftover crap they used on the original York), and upgraded hydraulics. among other things.
As for a system that I would like to have seen in service...what the hell, I pick:
AAI Corporation's Lightweight Rapid Deployment Force Vehicle, with 75mm Ares Autocannon. There were a few variants, including this one with eight Stinger antiaircraft missiles.
Well, AAI had at least one other autocannon system that used the 90mm instead of a 75mm bore. Better kinetic capabilities than the 75mm, although it was heavier and had less ammo.
Personally? I would ram through the US's ETC program. For those who don't know, the USN started an Electrothermal Chemical weapons program to improve CIWS and main armament capabilities late into the Cold War. They had prototypes for a 60mm CIWS gun, a 120mm tank gun, a 127mm naval rifle, and a 140mm tank gun.
Another program I would ram through if I could travel back in time would be the Cheyenne. It was a semi-modular platform that was planned to do a lot of capabilities that we want in a combat helicopter these days...
