Re: PLAN Type 052 Class Destroyer
again, in a non peer conflict, such rounds may be useful. Though, even then, one still needs targeting assets. if those assets are, for example, helicopters, then an even better solution might be simply a helo attack with hellfire/jagm (if the opponent is a lightly armed vessel) or penguin/jsm/c701 if it's a corvette.
in a peer conflict, it is simply often too dangerous to actually have your ships approach the enemy to 100-ish km. While you do that, his helo/s will scout you and his antiship missiles (be they small ones on the helo or big ones fired from the ship) will be striking you from 200-300 km away. Or more.
i dont see much sense in combining gun rounds and antiship missiles as then one'd have to waste much of missile's range.
and in situations where enemy has enough assets that they can track antiship missiles from the air that same enemy would be attacking the gun equipped ships long, long before those ships could try and use their guns.
while ciws will certainly get a chance to intercept subsonic antiship missiles (providing they were being tracked beforehand) at least to the same degree as it'd intercept artillery shells, missiles are more easely massed in a swarm doing simultaneous attacks. yes, 127mm gun can have high rate of fire for a short time. various ranges are cited, from 20 to 30 to even 40 rounds a minute. in theory, that'd mean a single ship with a single gun can hope to put 4 rounds on a target within 6-12 seconds, when shooting at maximum range. if it went for shorter ranges, perhaps all 4 rounds could be put onto target within 2-3 seconds.
But a missile barrage from a single ship can be put onto the target within a few seconds. before vls based ashms standard was 8 missiles. but if the target demands it, if its an high end target - even 16 missile volleys or more wouldn't be unheard of. Plus, those volleys could be sent through such trajectories that they come from all sort of directions and converge on target simultaneously. barrage of shells from a gun would always come from more or less the same direction.
one could concentrate more firepower with more guns but standard doesn't seem to be moving away from a single barrel gun per ship. so one'd need 2 or more ships to get at saturation levels achievable by antiship missiles. Yes, missiles are by far more expensive when looked at on projectile versus projectile basis.
But they require less carrying platforms for successful saturation attacks (one saves money that way too), they offer longer ranges (less risk), they offer possibilities that simply don't exist with gun rounds - such as autonomous target tracking or even battle damage assesment.
and we haven't even touched upon longer ranged defenses, not just ciws. there's no reason why the likes of aster/essm/redut/etc won't be able to intercept projectiles in ballistic trajectories. issue there isn't about interceptor missile themselves but with ship based tracking radars. tpq37, which is a fairly small and weak radar if compared to the likes of SPY radar or Sampson radar, tracks medium caliber gun projectiles at 30-32 km ranges. Yes, it would be a situation where interceptor missiles would be perhaps even 10 times more expensive than gun rounds - but it'd thwart an attack. at least once. and in the meantime the attacker would be neutralized, if not sooner.
vulcano ammo and ags ammo are great stuff, superb for what they were devised, but don't blow them up into more than they are.
