Replacing ship's main gun with 155mm artillery?

Torbedos??? Every modern ship have them???...well lets see...hmm...Give me a minute.... Got it, haha...Latest Russian destroyers carry 533mm torbedoes...:nana: :nana:

...but those are for ASW operations

I hate being a pain-in-the-ass but perhaps little introducting to naval warfare comes at handy once again...

Dear Dennis:

The best source online for all naval gun info is the Naval Weapons site (, run by Nathan Okun and company. As far as I know it is the most comprehensive site for naval weapons in general and the best I've ever found regarding naval guns and armour in particular.

But when it comes to specifics (like in your example of the Bismark) individual sites may be more accurate.

Going back to topic, as Nathan Okun relates, the change over from the older 6-inch mount to the newer 6-inch mount caused a weight increase of 20 percent, and the higher rate of fire was accompanied by a loss in reliability.

This mount served as the prototype for the most successful big-gun mount in the US Navy the 8-inch mount on the Des Moines class heavy cruisers. In contrast to the 6-inch mount the 8-inch was one of the most reliable ever built and had 3 times the rate of fire of all previous 8-inch mounts to boot!

Of course this was obtained by a weight increase of 50 percent. So that must be the price one has to pay for the higher rate of fire and greater reliability.

With newer technology we definitely can increase both the rate of fire and training speed of a 155 mm piece, but I think experience will show that we will have to accept both greater weight and higher servo power in order to do so. Such a weapon could not be mounted on smaller combatant vessels.

Simply grafting a 155 mm gun-howitzer onto a ship (like the Germans did with the turret of a PZH-2000) will not create a dual-purpose weapon. One would have to take the land-based weapon as a basis and deliberately develop it into naval DP gun system.

The current US Mk-45 5-inch gun is a good example of a typical naval weapon. One in which (in contrast to European and Russian practice) the rate of fire was kept down (about 20 rpm) in order to maximise reliability and barrel life.

In operation the weapon is fully automatic and autonomous. The only crew needed are the guys who load the ammunition carousel below decks.

My fear is that the USN will lose sight of a cheap, simple weapons' (i.e. a naval gun) virtues and will spec and gold-plate the thing to death (super missile launcher).

Best Regards,

Dusky Lim

Gollevainen said:

Torbedos??? Every modern ship have them???...well lets see...hmm...Give me a minute.... Got it, haha...Latest Russian destroyers carry 533mm torbedoes...:nana: :nana:

...but those are for ASW operations

I hate being a pain-in-the-ass but perhaps little introducting to naval warfare comes at handy once again...

Click to expand...

Educate me Gollevainen. I wanna know what your talking about. The only use that I can think of for guns is either shore bombardment like recently in Israel or in close quarters littoral combat, like for example if you were fighting around Singapore, areas like that where there are lots of islands and such making it difficult to use ASMs and the enemy is probably quite close. Your use of faces and ...s has confused me.

I had Jane's Fleet Command (a very accurate naval command sim game. It's old but I reccommend it.) for years and I only used guns a few times. That's about as close as I have come to commanding a ship, I know it's lame, but I never had a whole lot of use for them.

Well a gun (and this has nothing to do with my love affair with artillery ) is still the most cost-effective naval weapon after mines.

Against threads which are with in the range of the ships main gun there is no other means to attack. In such close range -30 km there is no usability to missiles and frankly using expensive SSMs against targets that can be sinked/destroyed with artillery is just blain silly. You encounter enemy transportships, small, fast patrolcrafts, fixed instalations or spy-ships, what do you do?

In peacetime naval patrols in the ECC zone you might encounter foreing vessels exploiting your natural recourses...what do you do? Did the russian patrol boats fire a missiles against the japanese trawlers in the latest skirmish between those two countries?

No offence but computergames are computer games...no matter how respectfull publisher is behind them...To learn more about naval warfare I suggest everyone to READ something from the same publisher...

Thanks for hooking me up with the sweet info Gollevainen. Obviously, guns are still useful in many less intense situations. But as I said, they are still useful for littoral combat and in areas like the Persian Gulf, entrance to the Baltic, Straits of Mallacca, etc. where engagements are at a range too close for ASMs or if there are islands or civillian ships making things difficult for ASMs.

Lastly, having that gun on the bow makes sure everyone knows that your ship is a warship.