Vulcan Wheeled Carrier

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Source: http://shushpanzer-ru.livejournal.com/ LJ page

Hello everyone,

I usually try not to copy stuff one to one, but this is just freaking badass. Check this out:

PROLOG '85

This is the Vulcan Wheeled Carrier from like mid 80′s (the picture is dated 1985) by Standard Manufacturing. According to tank-net forums, this vehicle is described in the “Modern U.S. Military Vehicles” publication as follows:

The Standard Manufacturing Company of Dallas, Texas, used their practical little 8×8 Trailing Arm Drive chassis as the mount for the Gatling Gun, using hydrostatic drive and braking and a GVW of 16,000 pounds. Ground clearance varied from 10 to 22 inches, and the top speed was 45 miles per hour using a Detroit Diesel 6.2 liter V-8 135 horsepower.

It was also known by the name of “Excalibur”, which was the name of the first vehicle prototype. It is equipped with a 20mm Vulcan gatling gun. Pretty handy for trips to work…. :)

Standard_Manufacturing_Co._Excalibur-Vulcan,_1985

Standard_Manufacturing_Co._Excalibur-Vulcan_in_1985

39 thoughts on “Vulcan Wheeled Carrier”

  8. That is just the right amount of DAKKA to clear any traffic jam on my way to work. When will this arrive at my local Ford dealer?

  9. 6.2L V8, 135 horsepower.

    You have to wonder how they managed to get so little power out of large-displacement engines in the 80s.

    It wasn’t even all that torquie. 257ft/lbs at 2,000 RPM with a 3,600 RPM redline…

    • thats because its a truck engine. it is made to be long lasting and reliable. while car’s oftem have an average lifetime of about 200K km, trucks can get 1000k regularly

    • Yep typical American lack of optimization that always shocked me as European, but that was resulting from abusively cheap fuel prices. I still wonder how they make a waste of un-renewable resources like that.
      It’s interesting to consider that the high fuel prices (at least in Europe) since few years obliged the manufacturers to produce more and more efficient motors, especially by downsizing, like the Ford Ecoboost 1.0L 125HP that has 3 cylinders.

      But what the interest of such vehicle ? Anti-aircraft ???? There is not the single piece of armor, with a machine gun the driver is dead and the gunner stuck …

      • I’d like to see a 1.0L Ecoboost drive a 5-ton.. It can barely tug a Ford Focus around at reasonable speeds. A

        The entire purpose of an engine like that Detroit Diesel is 6.2L is torque. Making tons of torque at low RPMs for hauling stuff around.

        My statement was because that 6.2L diesel didn’t make much horsepower OR torque.

        And no, it wasn’t because “it was designed to be reliable”. Most military vehicles actually have much, much less mileage on them than your average civilian vehicle. My 1985 Honda has 350,000 miles (Not kilometers, miles) and still runs great. I see old military vehicles go up for auction all the time with the equivalent of 30-50k miles on them, or less, all the time.

        • The 6.2 was the engine in the Humvee, so they had lots of them and parts. Yes, the engine was absolutely terrible.

  10. I would love to cruize around town with that thing.

    Ahh all the parking spots i can have

  11. Crew may want earplugs when firing the Vulcan… Also the driver may not enjoy the muzzle flash if fired low over his head…

    • Take a wild guess how long does it need to run out of fuel too?
      dat Detroit 6,2 litres…

  14. 1988, Grafenwöhr, West Germany (yes, per-unificaiton), 2 hours after dusk

    We just finished up a run through the range in our M660A3 and were waiting for permission to exit. Since I was the Company Photographer (as well as CSM Jeep driver and M60A3 tanker), I was on the turret roof taking long exposure night shots of the rest of the firing line.

    That’s when an M163 pulls up to the pit next to us. I figured that it was going to do some practice with it’s Crew-Served weapon. What I did not know, but would soon find out, is that it does not have one :)

    Next thing I know it opened up on ground targets with it’s vulcan canon and OH MY LORD :) that was glorious as I watched from 10 feet away. It was like a Roman Candle as the tracers reached out, hit the target APC, and bloomed into it’s own ground based fountain of sparks rising into the night.

      • I did.. but my dumbass Brother In-Law ruined every photo I took while overseas. >:|

        When I was in the hospital adn home recovering from a motorcycle accident, he put a box of all my photos & negatives outside and they got rained on for months. It made everything congeal into a single mass….

        I would have eventually kicked his ass (once I healed), but he was a MMA cage-fighter at the time :)

  20. So what exactly is it? A self-propelled AA gun? A recon vehicle? Something completely different?