GarryB Sun Apr 21, 2013 5:20 am
Nothing wrong with being obsessed with the Dana... it is an excellent vehicle/system. The South African G6 is even better in the fact that it has been made mine resistant and has excellent range.
This new Russian artillery system however is going to be their standard turret, which by the way is completely unmanned and fully automatic, for a range of suitable platforms.
In the heavy tracked version (armata chassis) all the crew sit in the hull just like in the MBT version.
This suggests to me a standard turret... even the naval model should be able to be fitted to a vessel fairly easily though I would expect far more sophisticated stabilisation systems as the naval model needs to fire while moving,... will be fitted to a range of platforms and for certain locations would be ideal as a fixed system like the do with tank turrets for coastal defence.
I don't think there will be a light wheeled version and the medium wheeled version is clearly going to be truck based rather than crammed into a Boomerang chassis because of the reasons given in the article.
Think of it along the lines of the air defence vehicles... the Pantsir-S1 in the heavy brigades will simply be a Pantsir-S1 turret mounted on an armata chassis, and the Boomerang and Kurganets chassis likely will also take a similar turret... perhaps with extra gun ammo in the rear hull compartments. The light Typhoon model might have one gun and perhaps a reduced number of missiles or it might have a different turret with different missiles like SOSNA-R to reduce weight yet retain range exceeding that of MANPADS.
An option might be a hybrid system with vertical launch tubes able to fire the new Morphei IIR guided missiles, plus a mix of the very cheap TOR missiles in their latest models and perhaps TOR missiles with ARH seekers with a fire and forget capability...
The current gun artillery system is MSTA, which is based on the T-80 chassis, so it can have similar mobility to the tanks it operates with. The logical extension of that would be if there were BMP and BTR brigades that a BMP and BTR based model would make sense to give it the mobility to keep up with the vehicles it is operating with. The problem is that both the BTR and BMP would be too light to carry such a powerful weapon so they have substituted the wheeled version with a truck based version. To operate with the BMPs they would likely use a T-80 based model and accept the different engine and components, but starting from scratch they will likely develop the much heavier Kurganets chassis to allow it to use the bigger gun in an artillery vehicle.