How is a "gun platform" defined?
 

I was looking at the R2B: Return to Base page and it lists numerous aircraft, helicopters, and ships as "gun platforms", even ones that don't carry any IMFDb-approved armament (like the B-2 stealth bomber) or don't appear to have any onboard weapons at all (a helicopter carrier).

Furthermore, the author just simply identifies the platform (e.g., an F-15 fighter) instead of identifying the actual gun on said gun platform.

Is there a defined standard here as to what constitutes a gun platform other than "it has a weapon on it"?

IMO, the "Gun Platform" section should list guns that do not meet the regular IMFDB standard for inclusion. For example, crew served artillery pieces, tank guns, aircraft cannons, stuff like that. The gun platform section is a relatively new thing that has started being used so there are no standards for it, but we should probably come up with some. For example, I think the sections should still be listed by the gun name rather than the vehicle (we are a weapons, not a vehicle database, and just throwing up a "Northrop F-5 Freedom Fighter" entry with no information about what weapon it carries, if any, provides nothing).

This leads on to a bigger discussion, of if we are going to allow listing of gun/weapons platforms, should we make a page for them? If for no other reason than as a place to store a bit of information and pictured so that they can be found by other users, rather than uploading multiple images of the same weapon.

I thought he did ID the M61 in the F-15.

BTW, I have a bunch of photos I took at the 1st Cav and 4th ID museums in Fort Hood. I can upload them for users to use, rather than scouring for images across the internet.

I looked at it again and, yeah, he did. I missed it the first time. For all intents and purposes, the "gun platform" section on the page seems to only be for identifying the aircraft and ships themselves, which I'm sure is not our department.

Yeah, can someone answer me this, I thought we were suppose to limit pages to weapons that could be employed by an idividual rifle company.

ie. mortars, crew served machines gun, and recoiless rifles would be the biggest we went.

So where do vulcan cannons and five inch naval gun come into play?

We list the Vulcan Cannon as there is at least one of them in a Canadian Film Armory. You can see it in XXX or Death Race.

From the rules:

"Though we do list a variety of weapons in the individual movie/TV/anime/Videogame pages, that's just for the sake of being 100% complete for that page. With the exception of grenades (which we do allow), the only weapons which merit an individual page in the GUNS Category are any individual or crew served weapon that fires in a DIRECT FIRE role. Thus an RPG-7 qualifies as does an M134 Minigun. A grenade launcher is also used in the direct fire role. Though a flamethrower is not a firearm, it fires it's payload in a direct fire role (i.e. aimed directly line of sight at the item/person to be destroyed). What we do not allow are weapons which are too large to be operated by either an individual or small crew or are used primarily as indirect fire delivery systems. This disqualifies fuel air bombs, all air dropped bombs, mortars, artillery, IEDs, most explosive ordnance (other than a commonly issued grenade), cruise missiles, or the guns on a Naval battleship. Even the M230 Chain Gun has been used by crews in direct fire roles (not mounted on a helicopter nose) (at least one AC-130 Spectre Gunship has fired an M230 from a side firing platform, manned by the aircraft's gunners). This rule applies to individual pages in the Guns Category. Feel free to identify ANY military weapons system that you can verify on the movie or television pages. The pages have "Gun Platform" sections just for that purpose, which allows us to denote tactical military vehicles, boats or aircraft which possess a primary (and sometimes secondary) offensive armament.? [emphasis mine]

Actually it's not, it's a very old thing we kind of forget and then remembered again. It's primarily supposed to be, as far as I can tell, for identifying vehicles and listing their armament rather than listing all of it with separate gun entries, since obviously you're not going to find many tanks mounting non-standard guns.

I think what would be useful is an "other weapons" gallery page just to put all the images of weapons that don't qualify for their own pages in one place and avoid multiple uploads. Gun platforms should probably stick to live-action movies where they're physically present, unarmed vehicles should try to either get a screenshot with them in an ID in the caption or put them in trivia. Tanks you can usually handle by listing their coaxial weapon.

There's never going to be an internet movie artillery database, so if something appears and we know what it is, we should document it on the work's page. The rule is mainly about making gun pages for weapons which are unlikely to belong to a movie prop company; that would mean the biggest thing you could give a gun page to would probably be the 88mm FlaKs which some European armourers can get hold of.

So basically, if you can identify the weapon system and the platform, then do so, so long as small arms and direct fire weapons are identified first.

What I was bringing up was that the author had screencaps identifying platforms without any weapon systems, for example:

http://www.imfdb.org/images/0/0a/R2B-B2.jpg

AFAIK, nothing carried by the above B-2 is in IMFDB's scope, since we don't deal with JDAMs and whatnot.

http://www.imfdb.org/images/4/41/R2B-Dokdo.jpg

I don't see any weapon systems to identify on the ROKS Dokdo here.

http://www.imfdb.org/images/f/f4/R2B-F5-F4.jpg

I've been up close and personal with (and even inside the cockpits of) countless roadside displays like the F-5 and F-4 in this shot and never once have any of them had any actual armaments on them.

I used to put those under "Trivia," or "Miscellanea"

The ROKS Dokdo has a Goalkeeper CIWS on the bow, which has a GAU-8/A Avenger 30mm cannon in it (same gun that is used on the A-10):

http://www.imfdb.org/images/6/64/Goa...ampbeltown.jpg

Yeah, that image you could easily put under a section for the F-15's M61 Vulcan and just say it's a B-2 Spirit in the caption. Picking shots that let you say something interesting about either the weapon itself or the other things in the shot is part of making a page, IMO.

The two display planes, yeah, they should be filed under trivia, the carrier you can see the CIWS on the bow so it should be listed under that.

Really? I thought that was just a fourth helicopter from an odd angle.

In the screenshot you can make out the horizontal search Radar on the diagonal outrigger, along with the forward facing tracking radar above the gun itself. I have seen a few Goalkeepers up close so recognised it easily. However, and easier way to ID it is to just google the ship and you can see that it is a CIWS and not a helicopter:
http://media.defenseindustrydaily.co...Frontal_lg.jpg

There are actually two Goalkeeper mounts, another is on the rear of the island. I'm guessing the bow mount will have to go if the ROKN ever gets F-35Bs for the ship.

And in the caption you can point out it also has a visible RIM-116 Rolling Airframe Missile box launcher on top of the island.

I reckon there is enough room to keep the one on the bow. Assuming they would have to put in a ski jump for the F35Bdown the port side, would end up looking like the British ''Invincible'' class.

That's the thing, I don't think they'll go the ski-jump route. If these are supposed to be amphibious assault ships, a ski jump would block off a lot of real estate on the deck. The US Navy doesn't go with ski jumps on their assault ships for exactly that reason. (And ever since I was a kid, I've been wondering why no one has ever developed a hydraulic ski jump that folds into the deck when not in use.

Ski jumps are not just a straight ramp that can fold down flat against the deck, they are a smooth curve from horizontal to the desired angle. If they weren't a curve, there would be a big impact and stress on the gear of the plane when it hit the start of the ramp, and it would probably bottom out or tip over or something else not very good. Due to the fact it is curved, there is no practical way of folding it.

The reason that the Wasp class can launch Harriers without a ski jump is the fact that they have a rectangular flight deck. If you tried to launch off of a Dokdo, one wheel would leave the deck before the other which is not a good idea (you could take off from the stern, but to do this you would use a lot more fuel as you would need a take off speed that was about 40 knots faster relative to the deck). Generally launching without a jump is a compromise, as more fuel is required along with a longer run up (meaning that you could park less aircraft and have fewer landing slots leading to slower flight ops). A ski jump would not take up that much space (probably only one parking space) as a large portion of it would be off of the current deck area on an enlarged superstructure. If they convert it, it will depend on whether they want it to remain primarily as an assault ship, or turn it into a carrier.

Back to the topic, I Have never used the gun/weapon platform category, can someone point me to a good example page where it has been used correctly?

Red Dawn? I don't know if it's completely correct, but I suspect someone would've said something already if it wasn't.