I had never heard of Vasilek until I saw footage of it being used in Donbas on the back of a truck in pop out, shoot & scoot mode.
I was very shocked & impressed by the firepower it could produce.
It is a very potent system... if you wanted to lay smoke it would be ideal for getting a screen up quickly over a wide area, and for enemy troops in the open with no cover it could deluge the area in HE very quickly.
With Russia working on several modernised official Technical type vehicles & emphasis on unmanned, automated turrets a belt-fed (semi?)automatic 82mm mortar on a 4*4 MRAP sounds absolutely perfect for providing rapid, devastating firepower support for hard-pressed airborne troops.
If properly designed I'd expect it to have a more precise single-shot mode available too.
Very much agree, but I have not seen any information about a Vasilek-M yet...
Vasilek is over 600kg vs modern 82mm muzzle loading infantry mortars are in the 40kg range so yeah thats more than an order of magnitude.
For the towed model that is not as important as you might think as the wheels make it rather mobile and also stops it jumping around too much when it fires.
It is designed so a unit with towed weapons can come to a halt, deploy the gun... fire off 8 rounds per gun and leave in a very short time... a very very short time...
They made gun/mortars out of 120mm weapons... perhaps a shell with propellent charge for a 82mm gun/mortar might be interesting.
I suspect the fact that the 120mm rounds are so much more powerful and versatile limits the 82mm interest to super light weight man portable weapons... though this system obviously suggests further mechanisation...
On the other hand this turret has a recoil system, breech & elevation mechanism which will be a decent part of the extra weight of Vasilek so maybe not that much of a weight difference to add auto-fire
I think perhaps the question is not so much can they, but why should they...
I rather suspect precision is more value than rate of fire... the latter often scattering rounds and making them less effective against protected targets.
This (overdramatised!) video shows interior & loading
I like it.
The video clearly shows the system is fully automated in terms of receiving target data... it is an all weather system where the crew don't need to go out in the cold to do their job... just slip off the barrel muzzle cover point the gun and fire. Having a stabilised machine gun with thermals to protect the unit and being able to stop and fire and then move instantly makes it an excellent shoot and scoot system. The crew and the machine gun support crew are protected from light small arms fire and fragments by the vehicle and it has good mobility and speed.
Just a question of how much extra it would cost. Also of course in some terrain you might need to carry it anyway... so it is not going to replace the man portable mortar.
If the mortar unit is used to support an attack by lobbing bombs at an enemy position to force them to keep their heads down, then this sort of system would be excellent... sneak up via dead ground and shoot and move.... with a MG to protect yourself too.
Also carries 40 rounds of 82mm onboard apparently, some reports the mortar can also be demounted & fired from the ground if needed.
If that is not enough ammo I am sure a second troop transport Tigr could operate with it with extra ammo for both weapons... and perhaps even a drone to find targets...
Some of the video shows a mortar base plate on the rear of the vehicle so it clearly can be used dismounted, but probably only as a muzzle loaded weapon rather than a breach loaded one.
A Typhoon is a slightly heavier vehicle family with 4x4 and 6x6 wheeled vehicles but I think they would use bigger 120mm gun/mortars.
For Small 4x4 Tigr vehicles you could have quite a team with 30mm cannon armed turrets, Kornet missiles, Igla twin launchers, this 82mm mortar, as well as light troop transports and vehicles carrying drones and other equipment.
For a standard division I would think Armata and Boomerang and Kurganets and even Typhoon could probably use the 120mm mortars instead, but for very light forces... VDV and recon forces this would be much lighter even when fully loaded up.
It would benefit from being part of the artillery network they have created too.
It was introduced into the Soviet Army back in the 70's already and saw heavy action in the Soviet-Afghanistan War.
Quite unique even to this day! One of many "no analogue" weapons in the Russia or Soviet arsenal.
I believe the French also have a range of automatic mortars... they have mounted some on small boats...
Quite a potent weapon that is not particularly heavy.
Quite interestingly I seem to remember a plan to fit a Vasilek... to a Humvee... it was an American programme... the Vasilek was chosen because of its size and calibre and fire power... pretty sure it didn't make it to service but would be quite interesting... the core advantage of the Vasilek is that being an 82mm mortar it can use all the 82mm Soviet and Russian and eastern european ammo stocks, but can also fire western 81mm ammo too... though with slightly reduced performance to normal weapons.
Had a look at the US army started with the Vasilek on he Humvee and called it the Scorpion... but obviously cheap and simple is a problem for the US so the made it much more complicated and expensive...
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/20077/army-shows-off-awesome-automatic-mortar-system-thats-still-too-expensive-to-field
It had spent years before that experimenting with a weapon system known as Scorpion, consisting of a simpler Humvee-mounted Soviet-designed 2B9 Vasilek soft-recoil, semi-automatic mortar. That weapon feeds from four-round magazines and has a practical rate of fire of up to 180 rounds per minute.