Well, I've been searching and looking and bothering people about if they have any information about it, (Ian at Forgotten Weapons, Rock Island Arsenal Museum, and quite a few others) I probably made a pest of myself over this particular weapon.
Finally I was doing some reading about Rhodesian Anti-Mining vehicles and there in one of the articles was a picture of the Pookie, with weapon on the front bonnet.
The weapon in question was called "The Spider" and it's various incarnations would have anywhere from 8 to 36, 12 gauge barrels which could be fired either remotely or from inside a vehicle with a handcrank.
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| http://www.jmu.edu/cisr/journal/6.2/features/andysmith/andysmith.htm |
Now in the original article I read many, many, MANY years ago, it was mentioned that the Terrs as they were called, put out a contract on the head of the person who designed "The Spider", because it WAS so effective in breaking up an ambush.
Now there was also a version of the spider that had 3 rings of barrels, one stacked on top of the other, with the top most stack horizontal, the ones below it aim about 5 degrees down to give proper coverage. Hit 'em high and hit 'em low and hit 'em in between.
For a vehicles in convoy, the lead vehicle would only have the the front and side barrels loaded, the vehicles behind would only have the side barrel loaded and the tail vehicle would have the rear and side barrels loaded. That way they wouldn't have any "Friendly Fire" incidents.
Imagine, having 36 barrels, 360 degrees of arc covered, and you could fill all 360 degrees with lead just by turning a crank inside your vehicle. Using #4 shot that's 972 .24 or 6.1 mm diameter pieces of lead traveling at over 800 FPS weighing almost 21 grains each. And you could do that in less than 3 seconds.
Back to my story.
I went from tha article linked under the picture of Pookie, to some judicious use of Google Search terms and I found out there was an article written about Anti Ambush Weapons, used in Rhodesia, and "The Spider" had a decent write up in it with a few good pictures of the device.
That is where I ran into a brick wall.
There are NO, ZERO, NONE, NADA, copies of that article currently available on-line. I wanted to bang my head on my keyboard. I was SOOOOooooooooo Close, but I couldn't find an on-line source for the article.
However, I did find, that hard copy of the article exists, after looking it up in the World Catalog, which lead me to a library in Europe. And They HAD the periodical in question. Hmmm however, they are in "Europe", I'm in Texas. How could I get a copy of the article, without it costing me an arm and a leg?
Well, I just asked. I sent them an e-mail explaining that I'm trying to locate information about this particular system and inquiring how I could get either photocopies or a scanned PDF of it.
Three days later, I got a response, with a PDF copy of the article in question attached.
And they didn't even charge me for it. For which I am truly grateful. The young lady who responded and sent the PDF told me that it was a one time thing and if I needed help in the future I would have to pay for the time of the Librarian and any copies or computer time. And I agree with that, it takes TIME to scan in something and to ensure it scans in legibly and at a good resolution. I know, I've done it in the past when I scanned in a bunch of stuff for Gutenberg.org, (When you have a bunch of 100+ year old books that have been in your family's personal library and are somewhat rare you kinda want to get them out there for others to read) So for scanning in the 27 pages and ensuring they are readable and the photo's are properly discernible, I am eternally grateful to the lady who I shall NOT name. (She's MY contact pbbbttttt)
Anyway without further ado, here is the article after I extracted the pages and did just a few small touchups.
Below the fold to save on bandwidth.
