2S43 "Malva" 152-mm SP howitzer

Ok what do Russian sources say about it's range?

I am guessing they would say we could put a 30m long barrel on a huge truck and get rather more firing range than the western guns, but that would be stupid.

Just making the gun barrel longer... sounds like an easy solution to a problem... so why don't they make all their guns 5m or 10m longer and get much better range from the same ammo?

Well lots of reasons... the obvious is that longer guns are heavier guns, but the less obvious is that when you make a gun longer the pressures and temperatures inside the gun during firing get higher and last longer and do more damage to the guns.

Western guns with amazing ranges have to be REPLACED after firing more than 100 rounds per day... it damages the barrel to fire those long range high pressure rounds.

They are sniper rifles.

The Malva is a machine gun to fire on advancing or retreating enemy troops that are not going to bunch up in a nice single target for a long range guided artillery shell. They are going to spread out and move from cover to cover and they creep forward or creep away from they positions they were holding.

Having them in large numbers, having them able to use widely produced and deployed standard ammo, and having them being able to shoot all day every day tens of thousands of rounds a week is what makes them useful and valuable on a battlefield.

Having maximum range and a titanium barrel is what makes western guns effective in the propaganda war and war of the internet.

When they start firing 152mm HE shells at the enemy they will also be firing at positions that they suspect drones will be launched from too so artillery shells landing around the control points for enemy drones also effects what drones make it to their lines.

Firing from 25km away does not sound like much, but it gets the job done.

BTW the new GLONASS guided Krasnopol has a range of 43km from the standard guns AFAIK... the standard 70-80km range Coalition rounds use GLONASS guidance built into their smart fuses so they are already GLONASS guided which would make a GLONASS guided Krasnopol redundant wouldn't it?

That's the stated range, 24 -29 km. This is just a regular MSTA barrel, 2A64 L47, on wheels. It has same characteristics as regular MSTA.

Yup. Its range was good enough, but they want more and they don't want them to be so expensive... it is about having numbers.

Arkanghelsk wrote:

MSTA has short range even with base bleed or RAP rounds

Koalitsiya has 80km RAP range

That's because the Msta-S still has the 18L? chamber. The longer ranged L/52 152/155 mm howitzers both have longer barrels and larger 23L chambers to deliver the significantly increased range even compared to the old L/47 152 mm.

The downside is heat: 30% more propellant by volume and a larger wetted surface area meaning higher friction heating. This is heat that has to be pulled out of the gun otherwise it will cause the propellant to cook-off as well as exponentially increasing the wear on the gun itself (the steel expands with excess heat so the more material gets shaved off per firing cycle than what you want).

And that's what's missing from the current crop of extended range guns. Active cooling. Crusader, and Koala (the previous version with twin barrels was designed before the R&D has been finished) both can shoot at significantly higher ranges with not much resource losses. More importantly they can do bombardments at the nominal 20-25 km range at more than double the sustained rate of fire of traditional SPGs so you can actually halve your artillery park and replace them with these super expensive SPGs and still come out on top.

43km with the GLONASS guided Krasnopol rounds is not bad for range.

Cheap, lightweight and mobile and they plan to use a longer ranged gun in the future.

Training of cadets of the Mikhailovskaya Military Artillery Academy on the 152-mm wheeled howitzer 2S43 "Malva" .