2S35 Koalitsiya-SV 152mm

Well that is pretty clear, the new ammo is not compatible with the old stuff and so they will probably test some guns but wont deploy them widely because their focus will be on mass production and use of current guns and ammo to meet the needs.

The case can be much easier now, as the huge stock of old ammo will be depleted in a waste numbers.
It shall make the decision less problematic.

Raises some issues too of course because the incompatibility of the different ammo types and the issue that when you do use them you might be using them intensively which means when you store guns you probably want to make a dozen extra barrels for each gun and an eye watering number of rounds to fire through them so you don't have to keep the old ammo and old gun barrels in production if you do need guns from storage.

With very old guns not able to use modern ammo it might just be better to sell them off to allies that use them still and just make new guns and new ammo for storage.

The new propellent charges for Coalition look very good, and offer a variety of power options.

It is truly a gun/howitzer.

For those not familiar a gun is generally a high velocity long range weapon most often anti armour or for use as a counterbattery weapon to defeat enemy guns from a safe distance. It has a relatively light shell for its calibre and a high muzzle velocity to achieve max range. It generally uses a single charge propellent case or uses one piece ammo.

A howitzer usually has a heavy shell for its calibre and can normally operate at very high elevation to drop rounds on target vertically like a mortar. It normally has a variable propellent system so shooting at close targets it can use a high elevation so the round does not go as high so it spends less time in the air which makes it more accurate (less time to be blown off course).



As you can see the propellent "bags" are quite small so to get max range you use a lot of them, but that means for close range targets you might only use one or two which reduces recoil and wear and tear on the gun and saves propellent bags for longer range shots.

That certainly improves the situation.

I also should have mentioned that the Russian Navy currently uses the Bereg coastal artillery gun system which uses a 130mm naval calibre gun, but they have talked about using a Coalition based 152mm gun, presumably to replace the Beregs 130mm gun simply because it triples the range and increases the shell weight significantly, and such a calibre would also be useful on Destroyer and Cruiser sized ships.

In the Soviet Navy the 130mm was their biggest gun (Edit: their biggest modern gun fitted to ships made after about 1970. When the US reinstated their Iowa class battleships for naval gun support roles the Soviets returned some Sverdlov class ships into service and they had 152mm guns, but they didn't use them much) and was carried by destroyers (Sovremmeny class) and Cruisers (second Kirov class onwards, and Slava class cruisers), but the modern Russian navy has 130mm guns on Frigates (new lighter single barrel gun).

Going for larger calibre guns wouldn't make a lot of sense with the old guns that couldn't reach much further than the 130mm naval guns they already use at about 25-30km range, but Coalition reaches 70-80km with plans to more than double that range with special shells to about 180km with guided shells which would be rather potent against enemy ships... especially considering the rate of fire and number of ready to use rounds they would carry.

A 203mm gun with a range of 250km guided shells would be very valuable and a cost effective way of dealing with large numbers of enemy ships... if it uses this incremental propellent too then it would be fantastic at any range...

Mass production of the shells and propellent for the navy will make demand significant, but both using the same gun and same ammo will make it more cost effective as they can joint develop new rounds too...

I hope not.

The complication of twin automatic ammo feeds in the gun turret would be mind bending.

For a naval gun mount it would make sense... would love to see a 152mm gun mount on the upgraded Orlan class cruisers and the upgraded Alant class cruisers, and work done on extended range HE shells with 170-180km range with guided shells would be interesting.

Doubling the rate of fire is easy... just use an extra vehicle.

Mechanically adding another gun would make it heavier and larger and its rate of fire is already rather good.

For best rate of fire use rocket artillery.

Except that would cost almost twice as much as not just the gun and autoloader need to be duplicated, but the whole vehicle.

The cost of completely redesigning the turret of the 2S35 to fit two separate guns with two separate automatic feed systems (remember the turret is unmanned so you need at least two feed channels and an ejection feed to remove rounds you change your mind about)... the weight of the extra gun plus extra stabilisation and extra loading and unloading mechanisms would make the vehicle much heavier and more expensive.

Most importantly it will make it top heavy which will effect its ability to manouver on various types of terrain and what sort of transport options would be available to move it.

Trying to shoehorn an extra gun and mount and stabilisers would be a pain in the arse and the various zeroing systems would need to be duplicated for each gun because the top gun would be in sunlight and therefore would bend at a different rate to the lower barrel in the shade.

There is definately merit to a double barreled design, if you want a single barrel use 203mm, after all if it can handle two 152s a single 203 is no problem.

Firing multiple guns in a single turret at once really only works at sea or with very small calibre guns.

The only time high rate of fire is important is with AA guns and even then the 2S38 has just one barrel because it is about accuracy and airburst and guided munitions rather than blind pure rate of fire to be effective.

Instead of fitting extra guns to a land based vehicle it makes more sense to improve accuracy and the power of the shell and its range than to modify the vehicle to carry extra guns,

Whether the gun can fire 2 tons of shells or 4 tons of shells on target in a single burst is not important... honestly I doubt the target will notice the difference.

Wanting lots of barrels on a gun artillery system is childish, the equivalent of attaching bombs and missiles on every conceivable position on an aircraft model... it makes the plane worse rather than better.

In a naval gun mount they can make the turret bigger and they have space for extra feeds for ammo types and being mounted on a ship the water is an excellent absorber of recoil.

For land vehicles that have to drive around on tracks then the priority is to fire shells and be able to move quickly so they can do it again.

It is easier to upgrade the feed mechanism to increase the rate of fire if that is needed, but I rather suspect not having the highest rate of fire is not going to make the vehicle useless... despite what fanboys on the internet say.

In fact look at machine guns... if rate of fire was so damn important why are they not firing much much faster than they do?

Apart from the MG-3, most modern machine guns fire at about 600-700 rpm... there is no reason for that other than it makes sense.

Aircraft carried Soviet rifle calibre machine guns fired at 2,700 rpm with the UltraShKAS used on Polikarpovs, the helicopter mounted four barrel GSh-7,62 gun on the Ka-29 fires at 6,000 rpm, but most other weapons don't even approach that rate of fire.

Their aircraft gun families generally include a single barrel, a twin barrel and a 6 barrel gatling type in 23mm and in 30mm calibre.

The single barrel guns are for fighters and some attack helicopters because of their light weight, while the twin barrel guns have a high rate of fire but are not too heavy and are used in Helicopters and CAS aircraft. For aircraft that are high speed and for use against elusive ground or air targets they have six barrel gatling guns.

Interestingly the Su series of swing fighter bombers often had two 30mm single barrel guns fitted, but the Su-25 and Su-24 had twin barrel and six barrel guns respectively.

The Su-25 has a twin barrelled 30mm cannon and the Su-24 a six barrel 23mm cannon.

The multi barrel guns don't fire all barrels at once, the twin barrel gun uses the firing of one barrel to load the other barrel and eject the fired cartridge.

With a gatling one barrel position is for firing... in the case of a four barrel gun like the GSh-7.62, one barrel is firing, the barrel before it is loading and the barrel after it is ejecting the empty shell case and the fourth barrel is empty.

With a six barrel gun one is still firing and one is loading and one is ejecting... but sometimes two are loading and two are ejecting and one is empty.

The point is that there is talk they went to a single barrel gun to make the turret smaller so it can be transported by aircraft and train and fits better in boats, but I suspect actually the new long range shells will likely generate enormous recoil, which would upset the aim if the rate of fire was too high and the gap between shots was too short to allow the gun to recover to point of aim again for the next shot.

In sub machine guns you find something similar where the PPSH-41 has a high rate of fire.... over 900 rpm but it holds well on target, while other guns with lower rates of fire are harder to hold on target because the timing is wrong. Guns with very low rates of fire like 500rpm are easier to control because there is time to recover the recoil and settle back on target.

Whether they drive around in a big group of 6 or 8 or they operate independently and all hide as best they can, when targets appear that require a high rate of fire and lots of heavy shells it is likely that all of the guns in a single battery will fire on the target, either together as a group or individually from individual locations from which they will then immediately move.

Which tactic they use will depend on their enemy.... third world countries with no heavy artillery or artillery radar or HATO support and you can operate your vehicles together in a group which makes defending them easier as well as coordinating their fire easier. If it is the current situation in Ukraine then vehicles dispersed and hiding but ready to fire and then move perhaps with some air defence forces with anti drone weapons operating nearby.

Either way all 6 or 8 vehicle can fire on the target at once meaning that target is in for a hell of a time.

But if you need 20 shells per minute then use Grad or Smerch or one of the Tornadoes.

If you need better performance (ie heavier shells) then Tulip and Pion or Iskander.

Artillery is ready 24/7 and should be able to launch very quickly after being given the order to do so, compared with aircraft or helicopters or drones which might require a flight time to load up with the right ammo and to get into position to launch an attack.

GarryB wrote:Whether they drive around in a big group of 6 or 8 or they operate independently and all hide as best they can, when targets appear that require a high rate of fire and lots of heavy shells it is likely that all of the guns in a single battery will fire on the target, either together as a group or individually from individual locations from which they will then immediately move.

The point is a fire suppression rate/scale.
Most of modern howitzer systems can shoot a salvo with different elevations and charges, to make it land in the target area simultaneously.
That reduces the chance of the opponent effectively cover or running away from the targeted area.
Most of the systems rate of fire is being faked in a way, because they calculate the times having first round already loaded.
It is a common practice for both Pzh2k and Krab. This is how they achieve 10rps rates.
That is why in a real terms, modified MSTA already at least matches the rate of fire of PzH2k, and with a high probability surpasses it.
Especially if we consider the continuous rate of fire the western howitzers proved to be highly incapable of.

Yup. That is why they are giving a 30s rate of fire, to be later multiplied by fanboys while the reality is that they can't sustain the rate for any longer.

They are wearing out their guns because they are trying to fire them at the rate they fire Soviet era guns at and it is destroying the western guns... which is pretty funny really.

It is better to have affordable guns on wheeled platforms that makes them cheap to buy and cheap to operate, if you want really high rate of fire then use rockets because they can deluge an area with HE very quickly.

If you need more HE on target then there are glide bombs and plenty of other alternatives.

There was a video on the internet a year or two back showing a Ukrainian operated Vasilek automatic mortar... the clip was less than 2 minutes long and it showed the crew pull up and set up their gun and they fired off a clip and then reloaded and then fired off another clip and appeared to be trying to confirm their hits so they could correct their fire and the video ended with their position coming under direct artillery attack.

Normal Soviet training was to stop, setup, fire a clip and then move... which they did in less than a quarter of the time this Orc unit did.

So the claim is not that the rate of fire is critical but that the burst rate of fire is critical, well I would say most modern guns can probably fire a bare minimum of 5 to 6 rounds at angles and propellent loads so they all hit the target together, but an increase in rate of fire wont help because there is no way to make the first rounds go slower and the later rounds to go faster and still have more rounds being fired to arrive at once.

More importantly if the target is a point target most of the time if one shell is not good enough then more shells are not a whole lot better... and a larger calibre is needed.

When the target is an area target then using more guns or rocket artillery makes more sense than having one super fast firing gun because really rapid fire for such a powerful weapon will be shaking the gun mount all over the place despite support legs and other measures.

Guided shells and improved target spotting and fire correction make more sense than just firing more rounds.

Or are you suggesting a tank with four gun barrels would be good because you get four shots at every target which is bound to get a kill hit... except that would be obviously stupid.