M4 Carl Gustav recoilless gun
The Carl-Gustav M4 series of recoilless guns was developed and produced in 2014 by Saab Bofors Dynamics in Sweden. It is a multi-purpose, individual recoilless gun that can also kill infantry when attacking armored vehicles and fortifications.
Karl-Gustav is similar to the Soviet RPG individual rocket system, but with a much older history. The earliest version appeared in 1946, just after the end of World War II, and the improved M2 followed in 1964. By the 1990s, the Swedish military had put forward new technical requirements for multi-purpose recoilless guns: it could destroy all armored vehicles, including heavy tanks, at medium distance; it could deal with protected infantry by means of bumping and blowing up, and it could deal with unprotected infantry by means of air bombing; it could cast smoke screen barriers; it could illuminate the battlefield at fixed points to facilitate night observation and elimination of targets; and the quality of weapons was small and mobile. In 1991, the Carl-Gustav M3 model was launched, which aroused widespread interest in the world, and the United States also began to purchase this high-quality weapon, and its supporting hollow charge armor-breaking bullets, anti-personnel bombs, smoke bombs, etc., to equip elite troops.
The Carl-Gustav M4 recoilless gun has a caliber of 84 mm, a total length of 999 mm, a weight of 7.4 kg (without ammunition), and the use of ammunition: HEAT 751 armor-piercing shell (tandem warhead), HEAT 551 armor-breaking shell, HEDP 502 high-explosive dual-acting bullet, HE441B high-explosive bomb, ILLUM 545 illuminated bullet, ADM 401 flash shotgun shell, firing speed: 4 to 5 rounds/min.
M4 is more suitable for urban anti-terrorist warfare, the gun body uses carbon fiber, light weight, insisting on not using RPG super-caliber method although coarse is not easy to take, but the advantage is that it can be done shorter and more suitable for narrow space use. The US military has made a large number of modernization and information transformations, including the installation of tactical guides, which can use infrared sights, telescope-type sights, electronic intelligent sights, laser rangefinders, image enhancers, etc., to optimize ergonomics, adjustable shoulder rests, and more suitable for shoulder shooting. In general, it is shorter, lighter and more intelligent than the Soviet RPG series, especially it has a rifling itself, the ammunition has a tail fin, and the dual-action shooting accuracy is very high. There are also disadvantages, one is expensive; the other is because the caliber is locked, the upper limit of ammunition power is difficult to break, and RPG is a super-caliber maximum 105mm caliber ammunition. The Carl-Gustav recoilless gun is widely praised by Western countries, and has been exported to at least twenty countries, which can be called the heavy rocket launcher used by NATO and even the entire West.