Is Russia safe from F-22 and Β-2?

Because without guided shells the KS-19s shot to kill ratio is very poor, you will fire about 8,000 rounds for each hit on a bomber sized target.

BTW you don't need AHEAD type rounds for 100mm guns, proximity fuses are much more effective in that regard.

The main problem is that when a shell is fired it is on a fixed trajectory from the muzzle of the gun so in the 10-15 seconds it takes that shell to reach the target area any variation in the targets movement will result in a miss... any inaccuracy in the tracking, and cross wind through various layers of atmosphere...

Guns in this regard are totally obsolete unless the velocity can be greatly inceased (ie EM guns with muzzle velocities of 5km/s or more)

With that logic, against 30K feet targets KS-19 should be only a 'sky denial' value at average, at best it might score a kill or two. May be cluster shells breaking and spreading wide into pieces and then exploding might increase a probability of hit.

You and your cluster shells.

Cluster shells would not be effective.

Think of it in terms of capacity, you are trading a large heavy projectile for lots of smaller projectiles to increase the chance of a hit. In the case of a shotgun you wouldn't want a solid slug load for shooting at rabbits because the accuracy needed to hit a small fast object with one large blob of lead makes the chances of a hit very low. Also that huge blob of lead would make a real mess of the rabbit. The solution is instead of one blob of lead you use hundreds of small lead balls where one ball hitting the rabbit in the leg or whereever will not be effective, but because all the balls are thrown together and lots of hits at once are likely and your point of aim can be off by 30cm or more and you can still hit the rabbit with lots of the balls of lead with enough force to kill it then it makes sense to use the pellet load rather than the solid slug.

For a dangerous target like a wild pig or bear then a solid slug becomes the ammo of choice.

The problem with your ides of using cluster shells in anti aircraft artillery is that while in theory it should have all the benefits of a pellet load against rabbits in reality there is simply not enough shell capacity to have lots of little explosives that will spread out in the sky and create the area effect you are hoping for.

The most effective use of cluster munitions is found in bombs, where a 500kg standard bomb creates an enormous amount of damage near the centre of the explosion but its effect reduces rapidly as you move away from the centre.

If the target is soft and could be killed by a 2kg HE fragmentation device then it makes sense to put 200 2kg HE bombs in a 500kg bomb shell and release the bomblets over the target area so they spread out before exploding.

Despite only totalling 400kgs of HE the 200 bomblets will kill far more people out in the open and exposed than the 500kgs in the 500kg bomb.

The problem is area too... release the bomblets from too high up and they will spread too far apart and lots of people in the group on the ground will not be hit... drop them too low and they wont spread out far enough to cover the whole target group so again it will be less effective.

Even with a 100mm anti aircraft gun you will have the problem that the cluster mines are either very small in number, or individually too small to damage the target aircraft, and the problem of when they are released becomes an issue to.

At the end of the day just having proximity fused HE shells is the best solution found so far.

However, will a modified or upgraded guided KS-19 vrs Jdams flying at subsonic speeds and in the proximity of 3-5 Kms offer little more potentials? Iran has modfied KS-19 and boast of precision hits by Safir, but then ME countries like to thump their chests even before production lines are in place.

With guided shells the cost increases... I still say that Pantsir-S1 or TOR offer mobility and capability you are simply not going to get from any gun that uses conventional propellent.

EM guns might change this, but until they are viable the best choice is missiles.

Can a KS-19 type platform be first used to lobby an Igla at say 20K feet and then manpad fires in and does its 15K feet chasing? Similar to your idea of UCAVs armed with Iglas

The KS-19 is a high velocity weapon and the shells accelerate to mach 3+ in just the length of the barrel... I don't think a MANPAD would survive that.

A better solution could be an AAM or MANPAD with a booster rocket to make it two stage. The problem would be that it would need to acquire its target after the first stage has burned out. The Morfei is a short range SAM based on the 9M100 short range AAM that uses a sophisticated IIR seeker and full thrust vector flight controls and is lock on after launch.

Another option is the fact that the Pantsir-S1 missile and the Hermes ASM have a unified design so a MMW radar homing or IIR homing missile could be loaded into a Pantsir-S1 and fired at high altitude targets in a fire and forget mode.

Tripoli was in the hands of the rebels. So who made the difference? We all know the answer, so no point in argument.

Without ground forces air power is nothing... look at Kosovo... it was almost ineffectual.

Using precision guided munitions, Air Forces can take out tanks, artillery, BMDs and then what is left?

Using precision guided munitions in over 2 months NATO took out perhaps 12 Serbian tanks... and that is with uncontested air control.

One place I read that Israel Air Force is confident of destroying main tank divisions of Syrian Army in 3 days using air assets. Going by the past performances of IsAF, I would not throw a denial or rebuttal to those claims.

The USAF was going to save the people of Kosovo in a couple of days... a week tops, and who would argue with the USAF?

Again here are the main tasks cut out for the RuAF:

Sorry, but that is rubbish.

The main tasks for the RuAF are to protect Russian territory from hostile external forces and to cooperate with the Aerospace Defence forces and the Army.

They don't need that crap you are suggesting, what they need is improved hardware in terms of aircraft and weapons, to improve training systems and procedures, to replace obsolete equipment and sensors, and to raise the standard of their C4IR to the level where they can perform the mission stated above.

The difference is in the doctrine to fight. West prefers air force to minimize losses on its side. Russia and China probably prefer the ground based offensives and more so because they like to keep the costs under control.

Well I would say that the West prefers air power because it makes it easier to fight around the world on the territory of other countries. Russia and China have no global empire to maintain and therefore are focused on protecting their own territory, for which an Air force is largely optional, though can greatly reduce losses and improve the effectiveness of ground forces.

For firing on missiles and bombs, which don't do a lot of maneuvers in the sky, this is still quite effective weapon. Do't forget, ships still have large cal. guns, which are also used in air defense role.

But they are big labour intensive systems... can you really see them replacing MANPADS and Medium and long range SAMs?

With the advances in radar location, fire control, shell technology etc, why not fire a large number of 100mm shells into the general area where a high flying aircraft is located and fill that part of the sky with shrapnel?

Well the Italians have gone for a 76mm SPAAG, and GLONASS guided artillery shells offer potential for possibly hitting aerial targets... They really need a big change, like an EM powered gun that fires heavy shells at very high velocities... like 4-5km/s and then it might become viable.

Most likely for ships before land based...

I bet the demand for the KS-19 type should be much higher, given the low cost of operations and low cost per kill of Plane or Jdams type entries in the envelop of the radar.

But the point is that it will still be firing quite a lot of shells for each kill. It will require lots of men to man the systems. And of course as soon as it opens up its position will be easy to plot.

The thing you need to understand Victor is that there are no easy cheap solutions... the West has carefully developed its capability to steal resources from the damn natives for hundreds of years and spent an enormous fortune honing its abilities, making it globally mobile... taking over islands here and there for bases.

The whole six month Libya operation cost NATO $1B to $1.5B tops.

To turn a functioning country into a shthole... I hear the leaderships first law will be to legalise polygamy...

West does not like to lose men and extra costs incurred in war fighting is considered a consumption boost to the defense industry which creates more jobs and fuels further economic consumption.

Which is why Russia doesn't need to worry too much about F-22s because it has the capacity to inflict ENORMOUS casualties on NATO.

But to fire on bombs and missiles it need tracking radar for quicker lock on and tracking.

a 360 degree AESA with 4 faces would offer continuous 360 degree target detection... and you could put a hemisphere IIR optical sensor for complete radar and optical coverage. With such a vehicle passing data to Pantsir-S1, TOR, and BMP-4s (Armata, Boomerang, Kurganets-25, and Typhoon based IFVs) equipped with either 57mm guns or 45mm guns with laser guided shells a single shot against a bomb would suffice as the guidance will allow for deviations from the time the shell leaves the muzzle of the gun to impact.

The 57mm shell would offer the best performance.

Note Phalanx uses armour piercing shells because Soviet anti ship missiles had angled armour plates to protect their warheads, most other CIWS used HE shells to try to detonate the warhead of the incoming missile. This was the most effective way to destroy such a weapon...

Guns and missiles are not in competition, but supplement each other. Russia have two combined systems, Tunguska and Pantsir, which have both missiles and two twin 30 mm guns.

Guns can be very capable and compliment Missiles and can work together to make defences more effective.

The Shilka is a devastating system in the ground to air role and the ground to ground role and the Tunguska is just a step better.

Congratulations to whomever sold the idea of JDAM to victor... you really did an outstanding job...

One of the faults in combat of MANPADS is that they have such short range that they pretty much need to be located right next to what they are defending. For infantry units that is not a problem, though it often means that when your MANPADS teams are engaging the enemy aircraft the enemy aircraft are engaging the thing the MANPADS teams are supposed to be protecting.

In fact the older model MANPADS could only get a good lock on the tail pipe of an aircraft so they could only engage the target after it has attacked and is leaving.

With a gun based defence you would have to buy thousands of systems if you just want to protect all of the land you occupy.

The light portable nature of MANPADS means wherever you have troops you can have a few gripstocks and a couple of dozen missiles, so in a battlefield you end up with a good coverage of missiles so enemy air power cannot rest.

With separate KS-19s the cost of buying enough to get the coverage you want... you end up spending more than with SAMs.

Just think for a few moments about the coverage you would get from one KS-19... sure you might get 150 guns for the price of a Single S-400 battery, but an S-400 battery can reach higher and several orders of magnitude further.

With its long range missiles a single S-400 battery can protect a circular area 800km across... you couldn't cover that with 1,000 KS-19s or any EM gun equivalent.

The secret to success with your idea is to make the gun multi purpose... look at the German 88 during WWII. It was nothing unusual, just a high velocity flak gun, and at the start of the war it would be far to big and cumbersome to even consider it for an anti tank role where tiny 37mm and 45mm guns were standard and new 50mm and 57mm guns were being introduced.

A new gun that is useful in enormous numbers because it is used for other roles makes sense.

A new 45mm gun or 57mm gun for BMP type IFV in new Russian Brigades becomes a possibility. To get the velocity to penetrate armour of current IFVs they will need mass and velocity and with guided shells they wont reach 40K feet, but they will certainly be a threat well above the threat height of 30mm cannon.

Perhaps the next gen guns using EM might be in the 50-60mm calibre range and use enormous velocities to achieve acceptable penetration performance while retaining the shell capacity to be effective against soft targets.

Once the impact velocity goes above about 1km/s you don't need to waste space with a large HE charge.

With a standard shell the HE filling is important because the more HE you put in the better the blast effect on target, but HE is not very heavy so the more HE content the lighter the shell and the faster it slows down.

Having more metal in the shell increases mass which improves sectional density which means it has more weight to push through the air in front of it so it maintains a higher speed and gets to the target faster and with more momentum.

A shell travelling at 4-5km/s doesn't need to explode as such, a very tiny HE charge in the centre to break up and spread the metal the shell is made of either just before impact (with a complex accurate and therefore expensive and large timing mechanism, or a small cheap simple impact fuse).

The large expensive and complex fuse increases hit probability by spreading the fragments before impact to spread the damage and increase the chance of a hit with a small target... it also makes the ammo more expensive and delicate.

The small impact fuse is small and cheap and simple, but requires a direct hit to function. The spreader charge will greatly increase internal damage to the target compared with a simple solid shot, and the velocity of fragments will still be very high because of the high impact speed.

At the end of the day it works out cheaper to have a few expensive long range SAMs than thousands of cheaper guns... especially in terms of manpower... The Russian military is shrinking, not growing.

The system using guns will also be much resistant to saturation and decoy type attacks given the large number of shells available. Inexpensive, quantity response, added layer or cluster defense is the main point.

Actually the risk of firing large numbers of high velocity shells at very low firing angles would make gun engagement of low flying cruise missile type weapons rather a dangerous practise as your shells will likely do a lot of damage to the surrounding territory.

For the requirements you have outlined I would say a TOR battery is the ideal choice, despite its initial cost, the missiles are very cheap... they have no expensive seekers and are very simple command guided weapons.

The thing is that while the vehicles are expensive the radar and optics on these vehicles would be critical to shooting down low RCS targets like bombs and missiles, so you you might get your guns cheap but they only replace the missiles which are also very cheap. The radars and all weather day and night optics will be the same price for both systems so I rather doubt the gun option would be cheaper than the missile option.

More importantly the TOR system is highly mobile and can be track or wheel mounted or mounted in a shelterised trailer for protecting fixed things like airfields etc.

Don't get me wrong, I like gun anti aircraft artillery and I think it was a stroke of genius to combine the auto cannons of the Shilka type vehicle with the guided missiles of an SA-13 like vehicle to result in the Tunguska which is better than both vehicles... the two twin barrel 30mm cannon are more powerful, have a higher rate of fire, has a longer range than the Shilkas four single barrel 23mm cannon, and the SA-19 two stage SAM has better range and speed and lethality than the SA-13 and its missiles are cheaper too. The SA-13 has a range of about 5km, while depending on the model the SA-19/SA-22 has a range of 8, 10, 12, and 20km. The sensors on the Tunguska are better than the sensors of the Shilka and SA-13 combined, so you end up with a vehicle able to replace two vehicles with much better performance than either or both together.

In comparison the US equivalent is a Bradley with a 25mm gatling and Stinger missiles. The Tunguska outranges this system in guns and missiles which is not actually that important, what is important is that the Linebacker is barely able to outrange the ATAKA ATGM of the Hind with 6km range Stingers vs 6 km range ATAKA ATGMs, and with the new Russian helos getting 8km range Kristantema and 15km range Hermes it will be even more inadequate.

For the Tunguska the 8km missiles vs 8km range Hellfire was close, but the 10km range missiles solved that and the new 20km range missiles on Pantsir-S1 give it even more standoff range against western anti tank helos and attack aircraft.

BTW that Iranian system looks interesting but shows the weakness of wiki...

Mesbah uses 4 Iranian built Russian ZU-23-2 installed on a rotatable mount. Each autocannon has its own feed magazine. Each ZU-23-2 has a reported fire rate of 2000 rpm. But surprisingly the whole system is reported to have a rate of 4000 rpm instead of 8000. This is probably because developers wanted it to save ammunition. The mount can rotate in different angles but the exact degrees are unknown.[2]

As seen in the drawing the mistake the person doing this write up has made a mistake. The ZU-23-2 has two single barrel 23mm cannon which is seen in the designation of ZU-23-2.

The Mesbah doesn't use 4 Iranian built Russian ZU-23-2, it uses two of them, because a ZU-23-2 has two single barrels and the Mesbah clearly has 4 barrels.

The ZU-23-2 has two barrels with each barrel firing 1,000 rpm the same as the standard Russian model, so with two guns the ZU-23-2 mount fires at 2,000 rpm. The Iranian system with 4 barrels will of course fire at 4,000 rpm.

This is basically a towed version of Shilka except Shilka has liquid cooled barrels to enable it to maintain a high rate of fire.

I would think that the electronics and sensors in that trailer could be crammed into a relatively large vehicle based on the Shilka to make a much more mobile system would be better... or the Tunguska could be used with its more powerful 30mm cannon with a higher rate of fire of 5,000 rpm to a longer range.

In fact Pantsir-S1 would add 20km range missiles able to engage even medium altitude flying threats...