The army relies on 155 mm , or about a six inch round. This is proven, well established weapon. Would this be a n upgrade? This civilian is just asking.
If the “n” upgrade in question you’re referring to is “nuclear” capable, then the answer is yes, and has been since 1963 using the W48 (i.e XM454 AFAP) 100-tonne nuclear artillery shell! But the round was retired from service in 1992…
The W30 is ~22” in diameter, whereas the explosive filler cavity of a 155mm howitzer projectile is ~7.063” in diameter! In other words the W30 warhead won’t fit inside a 155mm shell, no matter how much tweaking anyone likely to try doing so…
Fellow civvie here. Naval shells have more throw weight per projectile. But adapting standard Army/Marine 155mm would be not the worst thing; but your Anti-Ship capabilities will be less than of a true naval gun.
I suspect that wouldn't be as true as it would have been in the days of armored ships. Nowadays, almost anything that gets close enough to strike sparks on metal will end up with a mission kill at a minimum. A quarter to 3/8" inch of steel or aluminum isn't going to stop much of anything.
"Proven, well established weapon" for its target set. The current state-of-the-art 155mm artillery round is the XM982 has a nominal range of 12nm when fired by the M777 howitzer. But I don't believe it has a proximity fuze option for air and small high speed surface targets. As Army/USMC howitzers are not designed to engage targets while rolling and pitching, an entirely new weapon would have to be designed to use the 155mm rounds you ask about. DDG 1000 had a variation on the 155mm theme in the 155mm Advance Gun System, but that weapon was uniquely designed for much longer ranges and thus was too specialized for general shipboard installation. Things *could* have been different, but weren't.
Artillery prox fuzes are designed to function as they approach the ground. There is no reason that you couldn't build an AA prox fuze, but it is probably would be a new fuze. But the rounds themselves would work fine. The current hot concept seems to be using cast iron for the shell instead of forged steel, as the cast iron shatters nicely into a cloud of fragments, so if you wanted to build a special shell that is possible.
Yes, but they also used vacuum tubes. I doubt any are still usable. I would not be surprised if they fit in the threads of a modern 155mm round, but no idea if they actually would.
Thank you for the correction. I wasn't thinking clearly about artillery shells. Cast iron shells as a "current hot concept"? Weren't artillery shells of the Civil War era cast iron? But then, we also use gatling guns these days - with just a faster means of turning the crank.
No, it wouldn't. An Army 155 mm round is bagged, while the Navy 5" is semi-fixed. That would require a great deal of change to ship gun procedures and the autoloaders developed for ships. Also, 155 rounds weigh around 100 pounds or more, while a 5" is about 70. That might not be much, but if a crew has to praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition, it would be far more exhausting.
A Mark 45 Gun Weapon System is built for vertical operation to get the round and charge up to the gun mount. Any 155 mm design would require an extensive design modification to go from the more horizontal operation of manual loading to the automated vertical load path.
Then we get in to Fire Control. Army 155mm is really handy for blowing up things on land. A naval 5" is a Dual Purpose weapon. The FCS would have to get all sorts of new data to accurately use a 155mm in anti-air roles. Information that would take some time to work on, that we may not have, and may not have time to develop.
Concur, Sal. The lack of surface ship gun firepower breaks my heart. Very short-sighted.
Reminds me of the F-4 Phantom II: Guns? What guns? Fighters don’t need no stinking guns! Uh huh, yeah, right. That got proved wrong; and just like that, fighters got guns again.
(F4 Pilot here - I flew C's, D's, E's and G's - my favorite was the E model with the gun, slats and less smoky engines. About a thousand hours all together).
A lesson the Navy never learned. No Navy F4's had integral guns, and the various gun pods were notoriously inaccurate (it was impossible to rigidly affix the gun to the airframe, so you could boresight the hell out of it and the first round fired knocked it sideways).
This is a surprisingly poor assumption. The firing of 160 rounds of 5" does not remotely suggest it was the most used weapon in these engagements. However, I am hopeful the 5" was used to flesh out the full capability of the system for further enhancements to the system.
Guns are economical, reliable, versatile, and proven. Did I mention economical? Any kind of guided missile/munition is expensive. 5-inch guns are good. Might 6-inch or 8-inch be better? And why only one turret? Granted going back to building ships around big-gun turrets probably isn't a good thing (although you have to wonder, has anyone ever done a cost-effectiveness study on updating, say, an Iowa-class?) but maybe two turrets?
"They told me that the cracks they found were no different from what was found in every ship of the class. They said the only difference was that the rate of cracking was slightly increased which was probably due the increased weight added to the bow by the Mark 71 installation.
It should be noted that all the ships built with aluminum superstructures experienced cracking... "
My 71 prototype is reportedly still at Dahlgren. 8” round with modern fire control and fusing could be highly effective in a lot of situations. The new production lines for 155mm rounds are reportedly flexible enough to produce multiple sized rounds. Oh but wait. We could take 10 years, build something from scratch that would cost 20x as much be be 10% better.
Another problem is, is both the Explosive Charge and Propellant that the Mk.71 8” gun used, haven’t been in production since 1954! And the newer EX-99 propellant used by the U.S. Navy since 2000 is far to powerful for the Mk.71 to safely fire without possible bursting the barrel…
I’m not saying that we should take it off the shelf and slap in on a deck without updates. Modern materials (thinking titanium) and processes could probably take this model and produce an effective gun system in less time than starting from scratch. Didn’t intend to engineer it here, but I agree with you, at a minimum it would need some work. I didn’t know that they were firing rounds built in the early ‘50s for testing in the mid-70s. That’s scary in itself.
None other that John Lehman and Bill Stearman agree with you - at least 25 years ago. Fortunately, the needs of NGFS hasn't changed and the Houthi's are likely very thankful that the Navy doesn't have an operational 8" RAP round. Every hospitable part of Yemen is within 100 NM of the coast.
"Ironically, yet again, the already successfully tested-and-approved Mark 71, eight-inch rapid-fire gun firing a rocket assisted projectile (RAP) actually would be a much more effective gun for the DD-21."
Live testing of the HVP round? No? Too soon? Never mind... A certain Pink Floyd song that begins with a rhythmic sound of a cash register opening and closing seems fitting about now.
And apparently the Navy did testing during RIMPAC 2018 on the Dewey. Then by about '22 budget cycle, funds pretty much dried up. So basically 6 to 7 years later, things seem to picking up again. It would be really nice to be a fly on the wall for some of those "milestone" go/no-go decisions.
HVP round was tested in September 2020 at the White Sands Artillery Range, from an M109A6 “Paladin” and was successful in intercepting and destroying an BQM-167 “Skeeter” drone…
The Courtney (DE-1021) carried 3"/50 guns, which was OK for the time she was built in '54. I would not put anything less than 5" on a new ship. A 2" gun is just silly.
I view this in the same way a terminal attack controller on the ground does. Sometimes you want a JDAM through a window. Sometimes you want a BUF to lay waste to a whole tree line with a stick of dumb bombs.
A faster 5" would be best. The 5" is a good weapon for all naval situations, and has the ability to comfortably manhandled at under 70 pounds per round. 6" ammo weighs around 100 pounds per round, so that would start tiring loaders out much faster.
Assembled below deck as part of the process. I'm not a 5" tech, but it's part of the load into ready magazine, from the main magazine. Place the round and charge into the shuttle, and it goes up. From there, it's up into the mount on the weather deck.
The autoloader would be based on the mechanics from the AGS (155mm/62 from ZUMWALT), that does work. It's what the RN is doing on their next generation Frigates.
4.7", the largest gun with a 60+ RPM fire rate. Vital for point defense against sea skimmers, boats, massed drone swarms... and potentially against Hypersonic Missiles if fitted with Ramjet-assisted IR rounds.
Pair this with a single 8" mount (for destroyers) and 2 quadruple mounts (for a new Heavy Cruiser) and you would finally have decent NGFS worth the name.
A lot of lessons & assumptions have been drawn from WW2, where the average hostile engineering team had their hands and wheelbarrows. Against a country with modern commercial construction equipment, and the Iowa class worn to pieces...
It's a patch, just a patch over our old foolishness.
Promising, but it was only tested as 4" prototype, and the ammo layout doesn't look suitable for sustained AA fire- what happens when you need to fire more than 28 rounds?
Also note the relative weight, 28.5 MT for the TAK-120 service mount, 28 MT for the Green Mace scaled down prototype(with just the ready rounds).
I don't doubt a design team looking to build a new gun would look hard at the prototype for lessons learned... but the truth is we really don't know what is possible 60 years on. The old tooling and knowledge doesn't exist anymore, the ammo and propellants are different, and the SpaceX types most likely to give us a timely product are going to come from a software and 3D printing background.
Artificial sweeteners are good for you, there were WMD’s in Iraq, and Anna Nicole married for love. Oh…we don’t need naval gun fire..or guns on the ships of the line in the fleet, in any capacity, you old thinkers need to go to the old soldier’s home and find rocking chairs. Really? Like the current Commandant of the Marine Corps saying the Marines don’t need armor (tanks) because they are too heavy, too slow and only have an effective range of 4000 meters with a 120mm main gun that shoots multiple forms of rounds down range like say at a building full of bad guys? Ask the Marines at the Battle of Hue’ and both battles for Fallujah, if they needed to fire a projectile further than 500 maybe 1000 meters and how many danger close rounds and danger close aerial bombs were dropped in the last 20 years in two battle spaces? A lot…amazing, the more things change the more they stay the same. If you can be seen, you will be hit, if you are hit, you will be killed. bring back the surface fleets guns.
The marines need to stick with what they are good at, which is not tank warfare. They are infantry, naval infantry. The serious artillery ought to be afloat.
Counting on serious artillery afloat is a fools errand given the pop guns the Navy has been mounting on ships. Tanks are useful in Infantry warfare. The Marines will regret not having both.
Just what is the function of "naval infantry"? How does it differ from army infantry?
Personally, I have no experience with "naval" infantry, but I do have some experience with army infantry and I can assure you that tanks are quite useful in helping infantry accomplish infantry tasks in a timely manner without taking excessive casualties.
We can't get an M-1 from ship to shore; heavy armor is the Army's job. The USMC is part of the Navy, a specialized unit just like the British Navy's Royal Marines.
Why not just buy the Italian 5” 64? Shoots twice as fast, auto loads direct from pallets with no human intervention, simultaneously load two types of rounds, the extended range gun rounds we shoot now were designed by the Italians for their gun, after multiple program failures here, the Italians sold the successful design to us. Gun barrel is water cooled-no hot gun even if you mag dump the entire ship. The FREMM frigate design in Italy has this gun, so we went with the weak sister….the 57mm….
I think they are looking for ASUW/AAW guns. I don’t an 8” is responsive enough for AAW. The 777 155mm mounted in a turret with an auto loader would be great. A titanium gun like that would do great in a salt water environment.
Yep. The 127/64 and mk.45 (I think Mod 4) were up for the UK's T26. Mk45 won, despite the Oto gun getting orders in Europe and apparently being significantly cheaper. Interestingly the Canadian's have opted for the LW127/64 on their T26 derivative, the River Class.
Yeah the toco lidd spruance arrangement still looks good to me. Just need to move the point defense to over the bridge and over the hangar with the keep out weapons amidship. 2 of everything with full coverage for each sustem.
Yes, 127/64 each end, and the latest Italian 76mm superfiring over it one each end. 128 strike-length cells. That's what I want to see on DDG(X). Which we might as well call CG(X) because that's what it really is.
I'd go with two or three 5" guns with a new autoloader based on what was developed for the AGS. BAE Systems made a decent weapon, and their team started off as Northern Ordnance, that became part of United Defense. Maybe have 57 mm MK 110 or 30 mm MK 46 secondaries for light air and surface defense if only going with two 5" mounts.
A 5" naval gun is currently 62 calibers in length. A 155 mm artillery piece is typically around 39 calibers in length. The Long Tom of World War II was 45 calibers.
The Italian gun is the best gun out there and it’s fully developed. It can shoot at twice the rate of fire as a mk 45 and its barrel is water cooled, NEVER a hot gun.
The army relies on 155 mm , or about a six inch round. This is proven, well established weapon. Would this be a n upgrade? This civilian is just asking.
If the “n” upgrade in question you’re referring to is “nuclear” capable, then the answer is yes, and has been since 1963 using the W48 (i.e XM454 AFAP) 100-tonne nuclear artillery shell! But the round was retired from service in 1992…
The nuke warhead fitted on the Talos was the W30:
https://www.okieboat.com/Talos%20W30.html
https://www.navalgazing.net/NWAS-Nuclear-SAMs
The W45 was the nuke warhead for the Terrier.
They were still getting deployed in the 80's...
https://www.seaforces.org/wpnsys/SURFACE/RIM-2-Terrier.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W45_(nuclear_warhead)#/media/File:Medium_Atomic_Demolition_Munition_(internal).jpg
OK, but will the W30 warhead fit inside a standard NATO 155mm howitzer projectile…
The point is moot...doubt any still exist...
Talos was a giant monster, so certainly not.
Since the discussion is about antiair weapons, the W30 and the W45 were the warheads the USN utilized on their surface to air missiles.
The W30 is ~22” in diameter, whereas the explosive filler cavity of a 155mm howitzer projectile is ~7.063” in diameter! In other words the W30 warhead won’t fit inside a 155mm shell, no matter how much tweaking anyone likely to try doing so…
Wasn't suggesting it could be.
I brought them up because those were the actual AAW nukes the USN fielded.
Fellow civvie here. Naval shells have more throw weight per projectile. But adapting standard Army/Marine 155mm would be not the worst thing; but your Anti-Ship capabilities will be less than of a true naval gun.
I suspect that wouldn't be as true as it would have been in the days of armored ships. Nowadays, almost anything that gets close enough to strike sparks on metal will end up with a mission kill at a minimum. A quarter to 3/8" inch of steel or aluminum isn't going to stop much of anything.
"Proven, well established weapon" for its target set. The current state-of-the-art 155mm artillery round is the XM982 has a nominal range of 12nm when fired by the M777 howitzer. But I don't believe it has a proximity fuze option for air and small high speed surface targets. As Army/USMC howitzers are not designed to engage targets while rolling and pitching, an entirely new weapon would have to be designed to use the 155mm rounds you ask about. DDG 1000 had a variation on the 155mm theme in the 155mm Advance Gun System, but that weapon was uniquely designed for much longer ranges and thus was too specialized for general shipboard installation. Things *could* have been different, but weren't.
Artillery prox fuzes are designed to function as they approach the ground. There is no reason that you couldn't build an AA prox fuze, but it is probably would be a new fuze. But the rounds themselves would work fine. The current hot concept seems to be using cast iron for the shell instead of forged steel, as the cast iron shatters nicely into a cloud of fragments, so if you wanted to build a special shell that is possible.
The first prox fuses were AA....Early WWII
Yes, but they also used vacuum tubes. I doubt any are still usable. I would not be surprised if they fit in the threads of a modern 155mm round, but no idea if they actually would.
https://www.navsea.navy.mil/Home/Warfare-Centers/NSWC-Dahlgren/Who-We-Are/History/Blogs/VT-Fuze/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTPm_VsK7FI&t=37s
Thank you for the correction. I wasn't thinking clearly about artillery shells. Cast iron shells as a "current hot concept"? Weren't artillery shells of the Civil War era cast iron? But then, we also use gatling guns these days - with just a faster means of turning the crank.
The standard 155 projectiles could be used where appropriate.
To have auto loading you would probably want to develop a semi-fixed propellant case rather than bags like the Army uses.
No, it wouldn't. An Army 155 mm round is bagged, while the Navy 5" is semi-fixed. That would require a great deal of change to ship gun procedures and the autoloaders developed for ships. Also, 155 rounds weigh around 100 pounds or more, while a 5" is about 70. That might not be much, but if a crew has to praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition, it would be far more exhausting.
A Mark 45 Gun Weapon System is built for vertical operation to get the round and charge up to the gun mount. Any 155 mm design would require an extensive design modification to go from the more horizontal operation of manual loading to the automated vertical load path.
Then we get in to Fire Control. Army 155mm is really handy for blowing up things on land. A naval 5" is a Dual Purpose weapon. The FCS would have to get all sorts of new data to accurately use a 155mm in anti-air roles. Information that would take some time to work on, that we may not have, and may not have time to develop.
Concur, Sal. The lack of surface ship gun firepower breaks my heart. Very short-sighted.
Reminds me of the F-4 Phantom II: Guns? What guns? Fighters don’t need no stinking guns! Uh huh, yeah, right. That got proved wrong; and just like that, fighters got guns again.
(F4 Pilot here - I flew C's, D's, E's and G's - my favorite was the E model with the gun, slats and less smoky engines. About a thousand hours all together).
A lesson the Navy never learned. No Navy F4's had integral guns, and the various gun pods were notoriously inaccurate (it was impossible to rigidly affix the gun to the airframe, so you could boresight the hell out of it and the first round fired knocked it sideways).
No gun is what happens when you let theorists run amok. In 1973, in the Yom Kippur war, most aerial victories were with guns.
It's very hard to strafe Egyptian airfields with missiles, too
Not much worse than the F-35, which carries less than 200 rounds of ammunition which, at ~3K rounds/minute, gives about two seconds of fire.
F-35 is a waste for the Navy. 2 1/2 Super Hornet squadrons for the price of one F-35 squadron, and the F/A-18E/F is a better fit for the Navy.
Sigh. F-35 haters never give up.
This is a surprisingly poor assumption. The firing of 160 rounds of 5" does not remotely suggest it was the most used weapon in these engagements. However, I am hopeful the 5" was used to flesh out the full capability of the system for further enhancements to the system.
Guns are economical, reliable, versatile, and proven. Did I mention economical? Any kind of guided missile/munition is expensive. 5-inch guns are good. Might 6-inch or 8-inch be better? And why only one turret? Granted going back to building ships around big-gun turrets probably isn't a good thing (although you have to wonder, has anyone ever done a cost-effectiveness study on updating, say, an Iowa-class?) but maybe two turrets?
Wasn't one of the bigger issues with the 8" Mk71 during testing, was the barbette was cracking or, not being stable enough?
Not quite, the Forest Sherman class had some design issues related to trialing Aluminum Superstructures.
http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNUS_8-55_mk71.php
"They told me that the cracks they found were no different from what was found in every ship of the class. They said the only difference was that the rate of cracking was slightly increased which was probably due the increased weight added to the bow by the Mark 71 installation.
It should be noted that all the ships built with aluminum superstructures experienced cracking... "
My 71 prototype is reportedly still at Dahlgren. 8” round with modern fire control and fusing could be highly effective in a lot of situations. The new production lines for 155mm rounds are reportedly flexible enough to produce multiple sized rounds. Oh but wait. We could take 10 years, build something from scratch that would cost 20x as much be be 10% better.
Another problem is, is both the Explosive Charge and Propellant that the Mk.71 8” gun used, haven’t been in production since 1954! And the newer EX-99 propellant used by the U.S. Navy since 2000 is far to powerful for the Mk.71 to safely fire without possible bursting the barrel…
I’m not saying that we should take it off the shelf and slap in on a deck without updates. Modern materials (thinking titanium) and processes could probably take this model and produce an effective gun system in less time than starting from scratch. Didn’t intend to engineer it here, but I agree with you, at a minimum it would need some work. I didn’t know that they were firing rounds built in the early ‘50s for testing in the mid-70s. That’s scary in itself.
None other that John Lehman and Bill Stearman agree with you - at least 25 years ago. Fortunately, the needs of NGFS hasn't changed and the Houthi's are likely very thankful that the Navy doesn't have an operational 8" RAP round. Every hospitable part of Yemen is within 100 NM of the coast.
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2000/january/keep-big-guns
"Ironically, yet again, the already successfully tested-and-approved Mark 71, eight-inch rapid-fire gun firing a rocket assisted projectile (RAP) actually would be a much more effective gun for the DD-21."
Still have to agree... I think the 8in is the sweet spot in Naval guns, and a tragedy that it's been ignored/forgotten for so long!!
"We could take 10 years, build something from scratch that would cost 20x as much be be 10% better."
And that 10% better is far from guaranteed.
Live testing of the HVP round? No? Too soon? Never mind... A certain Pink Floyd song that begins with a rhythmic sound of a cash register opening and closing seems fitting about now.
And apparently the Navy did testing during RIMPAC 2018 on the Dewey. Then by about '22 budget cycle, funds pretty much dried up. So basically 6 to 7 years later, things seem to picking up again. It would be really nice to be a fly on the wall for some of those "milestone" go/no-go decisions.
HVP round was tested in September 2020 at the White Sands Artillery Range, from an M109A6 “Paladin” and was successful in intercepting and destroying an BQM-167 “Skeeter” drone…
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes!
Shore and harbor bombardment might have helped shut down the Houthis, which is why we didn't do it.
Mk.54, yes; but a Radar-controlled Mk.110 would be very useful as well.
As my hero coach Woody Hayes said; "The best defense is a good offense"
The Courtney (DE-1021) carried 3"/50 guns, which was OK for the time she was built in '54. I would not put anything less than 5" on a new ship. A 2" gun is just silly.
Have you written a blog about the Two-Ocean Navy Act, also known as the Vinson–Walsh Act, of 1940?
I view this in the same way a terminal attack controller on the ground does. Sometimes you want a JDAM through a window. Sometimes you want a BUF to lay waste to a whole tree line with a stick of dumb bombs.
The sum total of all the gun rounds expended likely was less than the cost of one of the least expensive missiles (ESSM?) too.
And it's reloadable at sea.
But what is the better upgrade? 8" 6"?
a faster, more accurate, or smarter 5?
just layin out some other dimensionalities
A faster 5" would be best. The 5" is a good weapon for all naval situations, and has the ability to comfortably manhandled at under 70 pounds per round. 6" ammo weighs around 100 pounds per round, so that would start tiring loaders out much faster.
Is the ammo fixed or separate?
M1a2 120mm tank HE comes in at 50lb per round
Navy 5” rounds are semi-fixed, with separate shell and charge.
assembled below deck or at the gun?
How does this 20 round autoloader fit in?
Assembled below deck as part of the process. I'm not a 5" tech, but it's part of the load into ready magazine, from the main magazine. Place the round and charge into the shuttle, and it goes up. From there, it's up into the mount on the weather deck.
The autoloader would be based on the mechanics from the AGS (155mm/62 from ZUMWALT), that does work. It's what the RN is doing on their next generation Frigates.
4.7", the largest gun with a 60+ RPM fire rate. Vital for point defense against sea skimmers, boats, massed drone swarms... and potentially against Hypersonic Missiles if fitted with Ramjet-assisted IR rounds.
http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNSweden_47-46_TAK120.php
Pair this with a single 8" mount (for destroyers) and 2 quadruple mounts (for a new Heavy Cruiser) and you would finally have decent NGFS worth the name.
A lot of lessons & assumptions have been drawn from WW2, where the average hostile engineering team had their hands and wheelbarrows. Against a country with modern commercial construction equipment, and the Iowa class worn to pieces...
It's a patch, just a patch over our old foolishness.
But it's a very good start.
Resurrect Green Mace....5 inch gun....96 rounds per minute, firing sabot rounds...
Promising, but it was only tested as 4" prototype, and the ammo layout doesn't look suitable for sustained AA fire- what happens when you need to fire more than 28 rounds?
Also note the relative weight, 28.5 MT for the TAK-120 service mount, 28 MT for the Green Mace scaled down prototype(with just the ready rounds).
I don't doubt a design team looking to build a new gun would look hard at the prototype for lessons learned... but the truth is we really don't know what is possible 60 years on. The old tooling and knowledge doesn't exist anymore, the ammo and propellants are different, and the SpaceX types most likely to give us a timely product are going to come from a software and 3D printing background.
8. Mk 71. Updated. True since I was a frocked LT in the early 70s. "Perfect is the enemy of good enough.
Artificial sweeteners are good for you, there were WMD’s in Iraq, and Anna Nicole married for love. Oh…we don’t need naval gun fire..or guns on the ships of the line in the fleet, in any capacity, you old thinkers need to go to the old soldier’s home and find rocking chairs. Really? Like the current Commandant of the Marine Corps saying the Marines don’t need armor (tanks) because they are too heavy, too slow and only have an effective range of 4000 meters with a 120mm main gun that shoots multiple forms of rounds down range like say at a building full of bad guys? Ask the Marines at the Battle of Hue’ and both battles for Fallujah, if they needed to fire a projectile further than 500 maybe 1000 meters and how many danger close rounds and danger close aerial bombs were dropped in the last 20 years in two battle spaces? A lot…amazing, the more things change the more they stay the same. If you can be seen, you will be hit, if you are hit, you will be killed. bring back the surface fleets guns.
The USMC should not have been at the Battle of Hue’ or either battle for Fallujah. The marines should project naval power ashore.
Thats what happens when you have a war without the reserve components
USMC will regret doing away with serious arty and tanks.
The marines need to stick with what they are good at, which is not tank warfare. They are infantry, naval infantry. The serious artillery ought to be afloat.
Counting on serious artillery afloat is a fools errand given the pop guns the Navy has been mounting on ships. Tanks are useful in Infantry warfare. The Marines will regret not having both.
My point was that we should have guns on warships.
Just what is the function of "naval infantry"? How does it differ from army infantry?
Personally, I have no experience with "naval" infantry, but I do have some experience with army infantry and I can assure you that tanks are quite useful in helping infantry accomplish infantry tasks in a timely manner without taking excessive casualties.
We can't get an M-1 from ship to shore; heavy armor is the Army's job. The USMC is part of the Navy, a specialized unit just like the British Navy's Royal Marines.
I take it you have never heard of or seen an LCAC, LSV, or LCU. . .
"a specialized unit "
Specializing in what, exactly?
Violence.
OK, lets stir it up some more:
A DD should be able to carry at least 2 5" guns....but we give up the aft gun for a helideck.
What about the notional CG(x)? One, two, (superposed?), three guns?
Why not just buy the Italian 5” 64? Shoots twice as fast, auto loads direct from pallets with no human intervention, simultaneously load two types of rounds, the extended range gun rounds we shoot now were designed by the Italians for their gun, after multiple program failures here, the Italians sold the successful design to us. Gun barrel is water cooled-no hot gun even if you mag dump the entire ship. The FREMM frigate design in Italy has this gun, so we went with the weak sister….the 57mm….
Sounds good to me. But as a competitive shooter, I prefer big, heavy rounds, pushed fast.
What have you got in the 8" range?
I think they are looking for ASUW/AAW guns. I don’t an 8” is responsive enough for AAW. The 777 155mm mounted in a turret with an auto loader would be great. A titanium gun like that would do great in a salt water environment.
Titanium does not do well in the presence of chloride ions - chlorinated solvents are not used on titanium parts on aircraft.
Now, what does seawater have a LOT of?
The Soviet Alpha class SSN had a titanium hull. If it had a quiet reactor it would have been the sub from hell.
Yeah, not sure how they did that but the problem continues. Of course the Alpha is no longer in service, is it? and they never built many of them (7)
Fish?
Wheres that down button?
:)
We used titanium heat exchangers with saltwater. Never saw any corrosion or marine growth. They were the best.
Type 26 has an auto loader for mk 45. I like the 127/64 too for the ready rounds of different types and rate of fire.
Yep. The 127/64 and mk.45 (I think Mod 4) were up for the UK's T26. Mk45 won, despite the Oto gun getting orders in Europe and apparently being significantly cheaper. Interestingly the Canadian's have opted for the LW127/64 on their T26 derivative, the River Class.
Yeah the toco lidd spruance arrangement still looks good to me. Just need to move the point defense to over the bridge and over the hangar with the keep out weapons amidship. 2 of everything with full coverage for each sustem.
Yes, 127/64 each end, and the latest Italian 76mm superfiring over it one each end. 128 strike-length cells. That's what I want to see on DDG(X). Which we might as well call CG(X) because that's what it really is.
I'd go with two or three 5" guns with a new autoloader based on what was developed for the AGS. BAE Systems made a decent weapon, and their team started off as Northern Ordnance, that became part of United Defense. Maybe have 57 mm MK 110 or 30 mm MK 46 secondaries for light air and surface defense if only going with two 5" mounts.
A 5" naval gun is currently 62 calibers in length. A 155 mm artillery piece is typically around 39 calibers in length. The Long Tom of World War II was 45 calibers.
Scratch Mk 46 for Mk 38 mod IV. Higher elevation. Bolt on.
The Italian gun is the best gun out there and it’s fully developed. It can shoot at twice the rate of fire as a mk 45 and its barrel is water cooled, NEVER a hot gun.
Lost out to Mk.45 for the RN requirement, despite it being significantly cheaper though...
Never found out why, but the RN has used Oto Melera guns more recently than US guns.
BAE owns the Mk 45
You're right they do....
But it has zero UK content, so doesn't get any plus points in the procurement.
It puts cash in the coffers of BAE no matter what.