Eli5: Why are weapons(guns, tanks, some planes) named with numbers and letters?
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In short, it’s a bureaucratic means of classifying and standardizing things. They’re named that way essentially because the Department of Defense says to. It has practical applications like being able to quickly tell what the use for a certain item is, like the [Tri-Service Designation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1962_United_States_Tri-Service_aircraft_designation_system) used for American aircraft across all branches of the military. Using it, you can immediately tell whether an aircraft if meant as a bomber (B), a fighter (F), a cargo aircraft (C) or any other number of useful categories. The number attached usually gives you the relative order in which they were designed, however this can sometimes vary for any reason, from “we want to confuse the enemy as to how many types of planes we have” to “we thought this number was cooler”
The same holds true for for various other classification schemes, although the aircraft one is much more extensive than most others than I’m aware of. But the long and the short of it is that it’s easier and more consistent to refer to it as a standard code than some arbitrary name or description.
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