In many real life situations, 30 mm and 127 mm guns have been used to blow up pirate ships. It would make little sense to use an expensive missile to blow up a boat. Anti-piracy : Guns of various calibers are typically used to engage pirate vessels.This has standardized the use of naval guns in several roles such as The barrel rests in the casing when the gun is not in use and can be withdrawn by elevating the barrel and sliding open the covering.Ī modern Nexter 20 mm gun in a Remote Weapons Station ROLE OF MODERN NAVAL GUNSĪs stated, guns complement the missiles and offer a unique set of capabilities. The 57 mm Bofors, 76 mm Oto and 155 mm AGS have been fitted with such stealth barrel coverings on ships of the Swedish, UAE and the US Navy respectively. This allows for a small but meaningful reduction in RCS and the drawback is additional costs. Hence some very-stealthy warships use a design where the barrel of the gun is nested in a stealthy casing in front of it. This cylindrical barrel is also a reflector of radar waves and can contribute to the RCS of a ship. If you look at the pic of the gun with the stealthy cupola, you can notice that the barrel is exposed. It also has the side benefit of making the gun look better by giving it Non-Stealthy Gun Cupola (AK-176) Stealthy Gun Cupola (Oto Melara 76 mm) A 127 mm Oto Melara gun without its cupola In order to reduce the RCS, the cupola designs were given a multi-faceted design to deflect radar waves. It was determined that a traditional looking gun cupola with it’s rounded figure, ladders and other attachments reflected a lot of radar waves and increased the radar-cross section (RCS) of the ship. A cupola is the covering on top of a gun which protects the working elements from weather and water. Stealthy cupolas have defined how modern naval guns look. This article analyzes the various modern guns in service today, their capabilities, advantages and the technological innovations which have made guns popular again.
However they had to find out the hard way that guns can never be entirely replaced by missiles and that both these systems complemented each other if used in the right manner. Many ships during the 1970’s were built with a missile-only armament. This led many analysts, strategists, navies and designers to consider the naval gun as an obsolete piece of weaponry which was unnecessary on a modern warship. The heavy-caliber guns started disappearing and were progressively replaced by missiles. Other major navies quickly adopted this technology and developed their own missiles or imported them. The anti-ship missile (AShM) was a fast, accurate and lethal weapon which had an incredible number of advantages over the large, slow firing and inaccurate naval guns of that time. This continued until the 1950s, when the anti-ship cruise missile entered service on board warships of the Soviet Union. From the past several centuries, warships have been armed with a large number of guns for fighting other ships.