Fairchild Obliterator

[Flyer]

Might be a tight fit for two guns.

I modified that pic and there would be room. The outer fuselages would have a slightly different profile like below.
There would be no fuel in the outer fuselages, all fuel is in centre fuselage and in tanks on the six pylons. Because the centre fuselage is a normal A-10 it would have air-air refueling capability.

[Jesse220]

Wow that can replace the MQ-1 Predator

[PR19_Kit]

Wow that can replace the MQ-1 Predator

Except it would be around twice the size and FOURTY times the weight.............

[eatthis]

Wow that can replace the MQ-1 Predator

Except it would be around twice the size and FOURTY times the weight.............

with one hundred and eleventy three times the firepower 

[kerick]

I would lean toward the P-38 style configuration myself. Or perhaps a F-82 style with a gun or two in a pod on the centerline. With the guns off centerline the recoil will slew the gun right or left.

[zenrat]

Surely you can have the ammo drum in a different position relative to the gun by re-engineering the feed between the 2?
Then you can have the drum for the second gun in the former cockpit and the gun directly above the first one.

[Nick]

Surely it would fly backwards when you fire all the guns at once?! 

[Martin H]

Surely it would fly backwards when you fire all the guns at once?! 

I was thinking the same thing.
I remember on a visit to Alconbury when the A-10's were based there. The weapons tech giving us the guided tour of a 30mm mounted on a test rig said that anything longer than a 3 second burst of the gun would stall the aircraft, regardless of its airspeed.

On a side note it seems most A 10 drivers dont know the real range of the gun. The same tech mentioned the range when asked, but when told by one of our cadets that when they had asked the pilot who had shown us around his aircraft an hour earlier and he had said the gun's range was classified. The techs reply was a classic.

"oh? That because he doesn't really know. we don't tell the pilots the real range...If we did they wouldn't get in close enough!"

[Old Wombat]

Surely you can have the ammo drum in a different position relative to the gun by re-engineering the feed between the 2?
Then you can have the drum for the second gun in the former cockpit and the gun directly above the first one.

My idea is to move the guns to above the magazines, with the chutes looped up to feed them. That way you can move one magazine forward into the area formerly occupied by the cockpit, with the other moved forward almost to where the original magazine was (but not quite). The guns would be fitted with the mechanism above the front end of the magazine with the forward gun on the inside of the nacelle & the rear gun on the outside. This may require an extended faring for the forward gun supported by a vertical fin but the rear gun shouldn't need much more than the existing gun.

OR you could reverse the forward magazine (so that the feed chute was at the rear) & modify how the rounds were loaded, so that both guns could be mounted just above the rear magazine, side-by-side. That way both guns would be largely enclosed within the fuselage with minimal external farings.

I, personally prefer the 1st system because it allows the same gun/magazine unit to be used to replace all guns, with the gun mounting brackets just needing to be clicked over from left-mount to right-mount or vise-verse to fit any of the 4 positions.

The front wheel-well(s) may require some re-alignment of the magazine & may, itself, need to be moved to an (extreme?) inner/outer position on the outer nacelles. With no guns in the centre nacelle that wheel-well could be moved to a central alignment.

My tu'penny-ha'penny!