Gun pod

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A gun pod is a detachable pod or pack containing machine guns or automatic cannon, mounted externally on a vehicle such as a military aircraft. Gun pods may be mounted to supplement the vehicle's integral guns, or to add gun armament to a vehicle that has no guns.

A gun pod typically contains one or more weapons, a supply of ammunition, and, if necessary, a power source for the weapon. (Electrically powered cannon, such as the M61 Vulcan, may be powered by an electric motor within the pod or by a ram-air turbine.)

Gun pods increase a vehicle's firepower without occupying internal volume. When not required for a specific mission they can be deleted to save weight. Podded guns have an additional advantage for some vehicles of isolating the weapon's recoil and gases from delicate internal components, such as radar, and for jet aircraft, allow the weapons to be mounted away from the intakes of the engines, reducing problems of gun-gas ingestion.

A major limitation of gun pods is that they are intrinsically less accurate than an integral gun because the mounting is inherently less rigid, so that the weapon's recoil produces more deflection. This problem is particularly acute with powerful cannon like the 30mm GPU-5 gun pod. Gun pods also impose substantial drag penalties on fast-moving vehicles such as fighter aircraft.

Gun pods are commonly carried on military helicopters, and are often fitted to light aircraft to equip them for Counter-Insurgency (COIN) operations. Some air arms use gun pods for fighter bombers for use in strafing attacks. Since the Vietnam War USAF policy has been that the use of multi-million dollar aircraft for strafing is an economically foolish proposition, but the Soviet Union and (subsequently) Russia have remained proponents of strafing, and have continued to develop new systems specifically for that purpose. Soviet experience in Afghanistan in the 1980s led to an unusual innovation in the form of the SPPU series of gun pods, which have traversable barrels allowing them to continue to fire on a fixed target as the aircraft passes overhead.