New Airborne SP Artilliery Systems

In Holes post above the rear of the vehicle shows it stores the mortars base plate on the rear of the chassis, so the mortar is clearly dismountable... which raises a few interesting questions.

Does it have a breach loading weapon in the turret and an 82mm standard mortar tube elsewhere on the vehicle that can be used separately or is the turret mounted mortar dismountable and therefore both breach loaded and perhaps muzzle loaded too?

I suspect this is effectively an 82mm mortar made more mobile like putting a ZU-23-2 on the back of a truck... but with a HMG machine gun in support...

In terms of armour penetration it would only make sense with direct fire rounds, which could be quite potent firing from behind some cover... but purely self defence.

For guided top attack you would need 120mm calibre... although those new Bulat missiles are probably between 57mm and 75mm, and the new 57mm rounds they are developing could use improved ammo solutions that could be applied to an 82mm weapon...

2S42 Lotus on Octopus 2SDM1 chassis

GarryB wrote:In Holes post above the rear of the vehicle shows it stores the mortars base plate on the rear of the chassis, so the mortar is clearly dismountable... which raises a few interesting questions.

Does it have a breach loading weapon in the turret and an 82mm standard mortar tube elsewhere on the vehicle that can be used separately or is the turret mounted mortar dismountable and therefore both breach loaded and perhaps muzzle loaded too?

I suspect this is effectively an 82mm mortar made more mobile like putting a ZU-23-2 on the back of a truck... but with a HMG machine gun in support...

In terms of armour penetration it would only make sense with direct fire rounds, which could be quite potent firing from behind some cover... but purely self defence.

For guided top attack you would need 120mm calibre... although those new Bulat missiles are probably between 57mm and 75mm, and the new 57mm rounds they are developing could use improved ammo solutions that could be applied to an 82mm weapon...

In Afghanistan the Soviets used direct fire role to useful effect in protecting outposts. You have the added benefit of a weapon that can be used direct and indirect and being automatic can put down a lot of rounds.

I saw the base plate as well interesting.

Of course direct fire at this kind of penetration is only good for light armour, light buildings, sandbag nests.

That is what I was thinking... in the direct fire 100mm of penetration is not going to be useful even on some BMPs... so the direct fire usefulness would be limited in terms of anti armour use.

The RPG-16 had a 57mm calibre rocket and it got much better penetration than 100mm, so I suspect an 82mm round developed these days should also do better, but we agree it is not going to be turning back an Abrams or Leopard attack... I would think carrying extra HE rounds and taking down supporting infantry and light vehicles would be a more suitable use....


This is probably not a base defence vehicle... a turret with a 30mm cannon and some Kornets would be far more useful, but as you can see the range of turrets is expanding... this turret could be used on a much heavier vehicle like a Boomerang or even BTR-82 with the bigger vehicle carrying rather more ammo...

This could be the Typhoon light highly mobile... likely parachute droppable self propelled mortar member of the family that could zip around and attack targets from different directions. With each vehicle having GLONASS, when HQ gets a support request it can look at its map and determine which vehicles are in range and send them the propellent charge size, the angle and elevation to target and a timing so that if four different vehicles in four separate locations are attacking a single target probably from different distances that they can time the shots so all of the first four rounds fired land on target at the same time... in fact with a mortar they can probably calculate the first three shots from each vehicle all landing at the same time... so 12 rounds all landing at once... and then they can drive off...

Interesting... the scortch marks around the lower portion of the tube suggest when it is mounted in the turret it is breech loaded, but clearly they fit it with a butt plug for firing when deployed from the vehicle and muzzle loaded like a conventional mortar.

Nice... thanks for posting...

Correction... I believe in addition to the base plate they also carry a mortar tube on that vehicle, so the turret mounted breach loaded mortar is not removed for use on the base plate... obviously

Certainly not new but a rare piece >> the RSZO Grom 12x80 MLRS on a BMD-1 chassis.

Nice... had not seen that one before...

It's a pity they did not replace the BM-21V with a suitable alternative. A small number of mini Tornadoes would be a very useful addition.

In real war the value of Rockets is rapid introductions HE in a very shot space of time.

It would be the introduction of laser homing unguided rocket kits that would allow volumes of 57mm, 80mm, and 122mm air rockets to be used on vehicles in full scale war or COIN ops effectively and efficiently without needing to fire them in enormous numbers.

Having said that a pod with 60- rockets 80 would be useful with smoke and illumination rockets only on some mission types, but having HE rockets in the direct fire role and perhaps laser guided rockets for ballistic lofted trajectory launch attacks would be rather interesting.

Self-propelled artillery gun 2S31 "Vena" in the Northern Military District zone

The news release "News at 20.00" of the Rossiya 1 TV channel dated September 14, 2023 shows for the first time the combat use of 2S31 "Vena" self-propelled artillery guns, which are in service with the 1065th artillery regiment of the 98th Airborne Division. Previously, the 2S31 gun was not supplied to combat units of the Russian Armed Forces and almost all produced guns were exported to Azerbaijan.




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