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Did you know about the Soviet plane with giant water pipe guns?
(Photo: unknown photographer)
The 1920s and 30s were a magical time in Soviet weapons design. The Red Army badly needed modernization, many weird new hardware ideas were entertained, and Stalin's purge had not yet begun. One of the many strange results of this wild period was the experimental Tupolev I-12 fighter.
The I-12 (also known as ANT-23) was the brainchild of weapons designer Leonid Kurchevsky, who was obsessed with putting recoilless guns on almost anything. Recoilless guns certainly offered some niche advantages, and it's no accident that other countries were experimenting with them, too. These weapons made it possible to launch heavy, destructive, large-caliber ammunition from a vehicle frame which would have been too weak to withstand the massive recoil of a traditional artillery gun – such as a light airplane.
The I-12 was an experimental airframe designed to carry two 3-inch (76.2 mm) recoilless guns. What made it particularly unusual was that the two booms that connected the tail assembly of the fuselage also contained the two recoilless guns. They were also made of repurposed water pipes. The I-12 also had the unusual (but not unique) feature of having a push-pull propeller configuration: one propeller in the nose and another one behind the fuselage.
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(Photo: unknown photographer)
It certainly looked unique, but the I-12 never panned out. Firing the guns caused a massive backblast that threatened to down the plane during the first aerial test. Bailing out with a parachute was essentially impossible, as the pilot stood a good chance of hitting the rear propeller. Finally, the shells from the gun had low velocity and hitting an aerial target was out of the question.
The design, like most of Kurchevsky's ideas, failed to pan out. Kurchevsky himself was sentenced to death in 1937 for designing poor weapon systems, and the sentence was carried out sometime in the following two years.
(Photo: unknown photographer)
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