Russian Gun Artillery Thread

Robert.V wrote:

limb wrote:

Why did they consider retiring a 1980s  long range heavy counterbattery cannon but keep 1950s tier obsolete junk like akatsiya and gvozdika still in service?

Lets hope those rounds are in service already

Because  it's a niche. That was deemed archaic and  not needed due MLRS, BM's,  guided  missiles and on the horizon longer range 152 mm arty.    It's stayed due  upgrade potential and the explosive payload not to mention ability to sustain  with easy 50 rounds an hour  and fairly cheap footprint and cost of rounds.

Akatsiya and Gvozdika where planned to be replaced  but the SU fell.   And Russian for  a decade plus couldn't afford the R&D or replacement of them.



Gvozdika has been and is  being converted into 2S34 "Khosta"     And  Akatsiya was underway being  replaced by 2S19 "Msta-S but that got interrupted by dissolution of the Soviet Union as said above.  

By the time  Russia could afford more  2S19 "Msta-S" ...it got morally obsolete.  And the  new modification/deep modernization of the 2S19 under the name 2S33 "Msta-SM" which was already started during the twilight of Soviet Union got dropped for  2S35 "Coalition-SV" program.   Which in hindsight was a dumb move.


Hence why Akatsiya is still around.      

On a side note.    

There was a potent Akatsiya  modernization under the index 2S3M3 which would have allowed it to fire most(but not all)  rounds at the same distances as 2S19 "Msta-S".

But that too was not considered due to expectations of  2S35 "Coalition-SV" being around the corner.

Actually the 2S1 and 2S3 are highly mobile and very versatile and are very useful vehicles... and with modern upgrades they would be very difficult to deal with.

limb wrote:

Koalitsiya has been "around the corner" since 2012, but still only 15 have been built. The fact that the Msta-SM2(still obsolete compared to krab, pzh-2000, etc) is being funded more than the koalitsiya says someone effed up. Either the koalitsiya is inoperable or russian procurement is making a mistake.

GarryB wrote:Those articles didn't say 203mm guided shells did  not exist before...

GarryB wrote:

This one says new ammo is being developed... I really hope they mean super long range guided rounds like those developed for Coalition.

mnztr wrote:I am curious why the 2s7 does not have a muzzle break. Is that because the crew is exposed? The whole massive thing rocks on the chassis from recoil, must send massive shock back through the entire chassis. With such a massive caliber a muzzle break would make a big diff.

On Artillery Day, I would like to tell a little about the history of the use of this type of weapon in the Northern Military District.

Most of the gunners, before February 24, had no idea how to fight with modern conditions. The experience of Syria does not suit Ukraine at all, and no one has studied the 8-year-old conflict in the Donbass and the evolution of the use of artillery. There were more important things...

No one created new artillery systems either. There are still no systems similar to the "777" and "Caesars". (They will say again that Serdyukov is to blame for everything).

On February 24, most of the artillery went into battle with compass and binoculars at hand. The spotter needed to climb a tree or somewhere else and control the fire - there was not enough, and in most cases, there was no UAV. There was nothing like "Nettle" and "Dill" in the Russian Army either. (A commentator should appear here who will say that we had everything, you just don’t know!). Few knew about the existence of Offlinemaps. The program allows any person who knows how to press the touch screen with their fingers to carry out gun aiming. Just put the gun in the direction of the target, X and Y are shown on the map. Raise the copter and adjust by eye: south, north, etc. Everything. (Especially for telephonophobes, I’ll say: buy Chinese, do not insert a SIM card, download the application via Wi-Fi and update the cards in the same way. You will also need a phone with a SIM card - you need to somehow keep in touch).

But the students still don't know about it. Mobilized and volunteers come from the training grounds, and there they teach artillerymen as if the SVO had not begun. Maybe two weeks ago I saw a newly formed artillery brigade that arrived from the Russian Federation. There, the commander ordered to send two spotters to the front line, to monitor the work of artillery. One had a Mavic 2 on his shoulder, but they didn't know how to use it. It's just there, so you need to take it with you. "Take everything!" - such an order! They had to unfold the compass and look through binoculars. These two served in the army for a long time, of course, not in the artillery. There is no "offlinemaps", and I had to explain for a long time that "offline" means that the application can work without the Internet. I’m wondering: was their brigade commander really not interested in everything that happened around the last 9 months? What can I say, if in 2019, in the LPR, the "adviser" taught the officers (officers !!!) to adjust the fire on the "snail"! Well, i.e. the level of a boarding school ... Including due to the lack of normal adjustments, our artillery had to release wagons of shells, with which there is now a large shortage. Reconnaissance targets for artillery in 90% of cases are civilian DGI copters, bought by civilians and put into the army by volunteers. WITHOUT THIS HELP, OUR ARMY WOULD HAVE BEEN DESTROYED LONG AGO! We need to remember and be aware of this.

How many times I have been in the army, I still have not studied the capabilities of the "Aistenok" and other similar systems. For the most part, no one knows how to use them or, perhaps, they are not effective. I can say one thing for sure: I have never heard at the command post that they received target designation from radar devices.

Despite the technical lag behind NATO systems, the Russian gods of war will easily solve the issue with Ukraine if more Orlan-30s are given to the troops to adjust Krasnopol, as well as more UAVs with the ability to fly 30 kilometers. It would be nice to experiment with satellite communications by deploying it at the UAV control center and at the firing line. Through the broadcast in the cart, in the general chat, without any radio exchange, to correct the work of the guns.

By the way, telegrams became a formidable weapon of this war. It is in the closed groups of this messenger that artillery officers from different units, but in the same direction, exchange information about the enemy and targets. This helps to organize interaction more efficiently, eliminating unnecessary links. I wrote about such an organization of interaction even before the NVO, but I was convinced that this already exists in the troops and is about to appear everywhere. As usual...

To everyone involved, Happy Holidays again!
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lyle6 wrote:Shortages of shells? I wish someone would have told the Russian Army, then they wouldn't be firing all those non-existent shells non-stop

Happy Holidays Artillerymen! It just so happened that from the age of 16 I worked closely with artillerymen and therefore I can draw some conclusions.

The Syrian experience has revealed many of the problems of Russian artillery. It was in Syria that the interaction between UAVs and artillery was built. Prior to that, spotters from the front line called TAPIK to the headquarters. Now, in real time, the generals watched the battlefield on large screens. Aircraft controllers and artillery spotters moved to headquarters - and this was a big step forward.

The Syrian war saved the Krasnopol shells. Before the Syrian conflict, they were aimed at the target from the ground. The effectiveness was small, so they wanted to abandon them. In 2017, the designers hung a target designator on a UAV (Orlan 30 type) and from that moment on, 152mm guns turned into sniper rifles that hit for tens of kilometers.

The battles in Syria showed the low training of personnel and the unsatisfactory performance of artillery with conventional shells. Flights of 300 meters did not surprise anyone. And if stationary targets were more or less destroyed, then hitting a moving target remained an almost unrealistic task.

The Karabakh conflict showed that even Soviet artillery systems can effectively hit the enemy. I want to pay tribute to the Armenian artillerymen. Despite the fact that they used outdated guns such as D-20 and D-1, due to competent adjustment and training of personnel, the Azerbaijani army suffered significant losses. In addition, the Armenians actively dug in their guns and this is worth learning.

Unfortunately, the Syrian and Karabakh experience revealed many problems, but it was not generalized, comprehended and scaled. What worked on a small theater of operations stopped working on the scale of the SVO. From the very beginning of the conflict, plasma screens hung in the headquarters, but the drones (Orlan 10, Orlan 30) quickly ran out. To correct it, they had to send specialists to the front line. Without the UAV "Krasnopol" was not used. The usual scheme of interaction crumbled before our eyes.

The scale of the SVO required a huge number of artillery systems, while there were not so many trained crews. Theoretically, we could neutralize the human factor by the massive arrival of modern systems. But instead of "Coalitions" we saw the Soviet D-1.

Now Russian artillery is being reborn through sweat and blood. The state has realized the importance of high-precision weapons, and we are moving towards this goal. Despite the losses, our gunners get the experience that could not be dreamed of by training at the training grounds. There are mistakes and shortcomings, but this is just an excuse to develop and move forward. And I believe in our guys. They will succeed.

limb wrote:Another more optimistic post highlighting how terrible and primitve russian artillery fire control technology and tactics were at the time of the beggining of the SVO, this time by voenkors Harchenko and Shilov. It however doesnt mention acute shortages of orlans(an absolute fact, only 6 orlans were given per brigade of 8000 troops).

Its just insane how potbelly dinosaurs expected russian artillery spotters to haul a 20kg shitty tripod laser designator on the frontline from the 80s instead of using laser designator drones, until like 2015.

The "d1s instead of koalitsiyas" line hit hard. No modern easy to use SPGs for you artillery crews, they're only for parades. We took berlin with D-1s, now take bakhmut with them too. excuse us while we invest money into giant underwater AI dildos.

No-one's using D1s

while the Koalitsiya is still a prototype

And who realized it sooner?

The mid-2010s was about the advent of drones lasing targets for artillery.

GarryB wrote:Yeah yeah yeah Limb... I am not even bothering to read the shit you post...

these people seem as bitter as you and complaining on the internet that the sky is falling and Russia is about to lose because a country that spends less on its military every year has artillery vastly better in numbers and performance than HATO countries with massive budgets and able to buy things from each other and therefore sharing the cost of system

but these guys you listen to sound like trolls spreading shit to pander to western audiences and bi curious Russians.

We've been over this already, and not only with myself - the situations in which you'll be employing dumb shells with grid co-ordinates, or relative to landmarks, or otherwise approximately; will massively outnumber the situations where you'll want to use guided shells.

Yes they are, especially LDNR units.

Meanwhile many of you make fun of ukraine using 85mm and 130mm field guns.

Which is retarded. Its not a prototype also, it was officially greenlit for service in 2016.

Turkey, Israel, South korea, China, US.

Agree and disagree. Guided shells are nothing but a crutch, for lack of accuracy with unguided shells, so theyre not the be all end all. However grid square bombardments are extremely inefficient and ineffective.

The best solution for artillery is to be extremely accurate with unguided shells. The krab and pzh2000 unguided shells have extremely low CEP. After just one correcting shot, they hit almost exactly at the coordinate. Russian artillery, other than the koalitsiya and maybe 2С19М2  cant do that. Thats why modern NATO SPGs are superior to cold war and WW2 artillery.

Pictured: extremely low CEP unguided shells

But never mind grid square bombardments. As you yourself admit, you can use dumb shells with artillery spotters or spotter drones - and achieve plenty good accuracy.

Limb, I'm going to be perfectly honest. I love the ruskies and their civilization as an outsider, but Russians like all peoples have flaws. One of them is the self deprecating doomerishness. Going to actual Russian defense forums is obnoxious af. All you will find on them are Girkin followers and commies and castaways that literally only shit on any topic of Russian defense. Want to find out any new news about the su-57? You must go thru at least half a dozen or more posts of all the criticism heard in pro western defense boards, as well as sulky doomer shit. I'm not joking. It's like that on almost every page over on paralay. Thr Armata thread. The Il-76 thread. The Udeloi thread. The su-57 thread. Etc....

The voenkor reports that there is very little to no training in using glonass coordinates, let alone having an actual FCS that aims the gun for you after you dial in coordinates. Thats the biggest problem.

A minority of russian artillery pieces have anything resembling a digital FCS, they only have sights and notebooks. Not a single 2b11, 2S4, giatsint, D-30, D-20, 2S1, 2S19, 2S3, Msta B, nona, BM-21 have them. Only chosta, 2S19M2, 2S7M, koalitsiya have them, and they represent less than 30% of the russian artillery park. The voenkor reports that there is very little to no training in using glonass coordinates, let alone having an actual FCS that aims the gun for you after you dial in coordinates. Thats the biggest problem.