IronsightSniper
Junior Member
re: PLAN Type 052 Class Destroyer
Again with the hypotheticals. You can easily do x on y, the problem is that it hasn't happened yet.
11 kg of HE v.s. 95 kg HE (explosive filler of the extended range rocket of the Smerch) is not of the same class of warheads, but again, you don't need to throw quarter tonne of HE at everything, in fact, large warhead payloads like that are only useful in some cases. A single 155 mm round that had the fortune of landing on top of a T-55 (or T-6x, I forget), managed to completely destroy the entire tank. Imagine a projectile with twice that power, with somewhere between 6-15 times it's accuracy.
Then comes in question of ammunition and rate of fire. You can fire 12 Smerch rockets at however much seconds (I forget), and then take, at the very least, 90 seconds to reload it (this is an educated guess, because the missiles of the Kashtan, which are smaller and less numerous, takes 90 seconds to reload from under the ship), and fire again. This is not as disconcerting as the space, however. For a moment, lets pretend that we're comparing the Smerch's rockets and not the Chinese copy's rockets, and lets pretend that the LRLAP is a cylinder, and so is the Smerch rockets. The Smerch's rockets are 2.049 meters long and 300 mm in diameter, compared to the LRLAP, which is 2.223 meters long and 155 mm in diameter. This means that, volume v. volume, you can fit 3 LRLAP and then some per Smerch.
A single AGS has a 300 round magazine, and can fire 10 rounds per minute until everything is used up. This means that the AGS can fire off 12.6 cubic meters of ammunition in 30 minutes. While the same space can only store about 86 Smerch rockets (round it to 84 so that all barrels are full). That gives us 7 salvos of rockets, and finally getting around to checking, 1 salvo per 38 seconds and an educated-guestimated reload speed of 90 seconds per salvo, means that the Smerch can fire off the entire magazine in about 15 minutes even.
Then we have weight. 86 (or 84, take a pick) Smerch rockets occupying the same space of the LRLAP which consists of 300 rounds, there's of course a difference in weight. Each Smerch extended range rocket weighs 815 kg, thus 84 of them would weigh in excess of 68 tonnes, meaning a density of roughly 5400 kg/m3. Each LRLAP weighs a total of 102 kg, with 300 weighing a mere 30 tonnes, which means a density of roughly 2400 kg/m3. All this math means nothing except for this sentence here, the LRLAP is more mass efficient than the Smerch.
Even though admittedly I have blown past the point I was going to make a few minutes ago, the point is this. The Smerch is not a cost effective weapon. The Smerch is an outdated weapon. Unless you modify the Smerch, it will not be effective for naval warfare, that which you have already discerned. However, how much does upgrading it cost? How much would it cost to fit actually competent guidance features to it? Then you have the address the concerns of "is this overkill?" Launching a 800 kg+ GPS-guided rocket is going to cost way more than the LRLAP, which has a good chance of adopting features from the M982 Excalibur to achieve CEP accuracy ratings 10 times better than what I'm using to compare the two. 5 meters CEP is enough to actually put an artillery shell in my room, 93% of the time, while guiding a rocket is going to be less accurate in most degrees, and of course, take more space, use more weight, cost more money, and do the same amount of damage (11 kg v.s. 95 kg, I'm dead either way).
1: We're talking ships around the size of shichang, which can be easily adopted from civilian analogues with the non deck penetrating MRLS aboard shichang
Hmmvw's description in the 071 thread "It's a containerized 300mm MLR module tested on Shichang, it's alleged that the launcher base doesn't penetrate any deck, and the container behind it houses rocket reloads and independent power supply and fire control system. Such system can be retrofitted to ships such as 071 (maybe clear some space on the bow deck) or 074 (open vehicle deck) to provide sustained fire support for the landing party, similar to a capability LPD17's original concept proposed."
3: 11 kg of HE compared to the payload of a 300mm rocket can be considered relatively small.
4: This whole discussion of MRLS vs guns was assuming the MRLS had precision guidance, and is not exactly a hypothetical weapon. China already offers a wide variety of guided MRLS systems "similar to Smerch"
AR-3 rocket brochure, you can make out ~50m CEP with rockets of range ~200km
Obviously precision guidance isn't far away. Although I'm not sure if the PLA's PHL03 300mm's have precision guided rockets, but the technology's there and it's already been demosntrated on ships.
Again with the hypotheticals. You can easily do x on y, the problem is that it hasn't happened yet.
11 kg of HE v.s. 95 kg HE (explosive filler of the extended range rocket of the Smerch) is not of the same class of warheads, but again, you don't need to throw quarter tonne of HE at everything, in fact, large warhead payloads like that are only useful in some cases. A single 155 mm round that had the fortune of landing on top of a T-55 (or T-6x, I forget), managed to completely destroy the entire tank. Imagine a projectile with twice that power, with somewhere between 6-15 times it's accuracy.
Then comes in question of ammunition and rate of fire. You can fire 12 Smerch rockets at however much seconds (I forget), and then take, at the very least, 90 seconds to reload it (this is an educated guess, because the missiles of the Kashtan, which are smaller and less numerous, takes 90 seconds to reload from under the ship), and fire again. This is not as disconcerting as the space, however. For a moment, lets pretend that we're comparing the Smerch's rockets and not the Chinese copy's rockets, and lets pretend that the LRLAP is a cylinder, and so is the Smerch rockets. The Smerch's rockets are 2.049 meters long and 300 mm in diameter, compared to the LRLAP, which is 2.223 meters long and 155 mm in diameter. This means that, volume v. volume, you can fit 3 LRLAP and then some per Smerch.
A single AGS has a 300 round magazine, and can fire 10 rounds per minute until everything is used up. This means that the AGS can fire off 12.6 cubic meters of ammunition in 30 minutes. While the same space can only store about 86 Smerch rockets (round it to 84 so that all barrels are full). That gives us 7 salvos of rockets, and finally getting around to checking, 1 salvo per 38 seconds and an educated-guestimated reload speed of 90 seconds per salvo, means that the Smerch can fire off the entire magazine in about 15 minutes even.
Then we have weight. 86 (or 84, take a pick) Smerch rockets occupying the same space of the LRLAP which consists of 300 rounds, there's of course a difference in weight. Each Smerch extended range rocket weighs 815 kg, thus 84 of them would weigh in excess of 68 tonnes, meaning a density of roughly 5400 kg/m3. Each LRLAP weighs a total of 102 kg, with 300 weighing a mere 30 tonnes, which means a density of roughly 2400 kg/m3. All this math means nothing except for this sentence here, the LRLAP is more mass efficient than the Smerch.
Even though admittedly I have blown past the point I was going to make a few minutes ago, the point is this. The Smerch is not a cost effective weapon. The Smerch is an outdated weapon. Unless you modify the Smerch, it will not be effective for naval warfare, that which you have already discerned. However, how much does upgrading it cost? How much would it cost to fit actually competent guidance features to it? Then you have the address the concerns of "is this overkill?" Launching a 800 kg+ GPS-guided rocket is going to cost way more than the LRLAP, which has a good chance of adopting features from the M982 Excalibur to achieve CEP accuracy ratings 10 times better than what I'm using to compare the two. 5 meters CEP is enough to actually put an artillery shell in my room, 93% of the time, while guiding a rocket is going to be less accurate in most degrees, and of course, take more space, use more weight, cost more money, and do the same amount of damage (11 kg v.s. 95 kg, I'm dead either way).
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