PLA Anti-Air Gun systems
- Thread starter MIGleader
- Start date
I do wonder if soon we'll be seeing dedicated anti air optics (ideally with AI driven target search software) on individual tanks and IFVs. Coupled with dedicated anti air radar vehicles driving behind - such a formation might be better suited to countering masses of dirt cheap drones with their regular guns/coaxial machine guns.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
Personally, I foresee mini-CIWS turrets to come online pretty soon. The basic tech is essentially off-the-shelf commercial grade. Take an existing RWS turret as base chassis, and I see a mix between 5.56/5.8/5.4 and up to 7.62 max and automatic shotguns as primary armaments, with a small AESA radar, laser rangefinder and EO/thermal ball turret as primary sensor suite.
Such a turret could probably be build for a few tens of thousands of dollars, which would make them cheap enough to equip en mass.
If you want to go fancy, the sensor suite will probably be sufficient for APS as well, so you could potentially do a 2-4-1 deal of getting drone defence as well as APS against conventional projectiles with added hard kill launchers hardlined into the turret ring.
If the software is good enough, such turrets can also potentially pull triple duty as ultra close range automatic anti-personable defence against Hamas style balls-of-steel anti-tank CWB assaults.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
Traditional AAA guns are not optimised against small commercial and dedicated tactical suicide drones like Lancet since 20-30mm is just too much firepower for such tiny targets.
Traditional AAA are useful against Gerin type strategic suicide drones, but I think such drones are a one-time deal as they are too easy to counter if countries devoted any amount of resources against them that they will rapidly loose their effectiveness and especially cost-efficiency.
Traditional big cal AAA will likely continue to remain sidelined and heading to extinction, but we will probably see a proliferation of 20-30mm mobile CIWS style AAA gun platforms as both tactical and strategic close defence for assets against cheap saturation attacks.
If they deploy enough of these mobile CIWS AAA with sufficient quality, it might even upset the current dominance of artillery if they can effectively intercept incoming enemy artillery and maybe even ATGM rounds to shield armoured spearhead assaults. If gun based mobile CIWS AAA can do that, then we might see the rapid evolution of a whole new branch of land vehicles that reply on speed and active defences instead of armour for survival. If heavy armour is no longer a core requirement, then we might see a rejuvenation of the cushioned hovercraft.
Imagine a massed assault of armoured hovercraft effortlessly gliding over enemy minefields and using 30mm Gatling cannons to shoot down incoming artillery and ATGMs and 7.62 Gatlings and automatic shotguns to take down Lancet-class suicide drones and DJIs. Then once they are close, all those 30mm gatlings get pointed ground-wards for direct fire suppression as troops disembark from the hovercrafts.
Not my field of expertise, but as someone who took a control system course back in school, I think the most expensive parts of an AAA system are the electric motors and related components. The gun have to move quickly with minimal oscillation and with high precision. A 0.5 degrees off means totally missing the target.
CCTV7 had a segment on a specialist that work on certain high-precision parts for PGZ-09. He had to refine the parts manually after they came out of CNC machines because the fault-tolerant is only 0.0... something millimetre.
