petit_bateau
Active Member
Over the years there has been a lot of debate in naval circles as to whether the 20/30mm CIWS are of any value against the larger high speed anti-ship missiles. The discussion hinges around where the debris cone is going to end up - most likely it will still come through the side of the ship at Mach 2. Given that the warheads have to work hard to explode before they exit the other side of the hull, you may just have made the impact worse rather than better by getting a dense debris field coming inboard. This is one of the reasons why there is a related discussion re 20mm vs 30mm as there are range, rate of fire, and munition implications and consequences for that debate. But they also have uses against slow moving targets as well, which has tended to swing the outcome in their direction.
I cannot recollect the control system for the Russian 30mm units. The equivalent Western units had one console per unit, and each unit had its own radar. They have to run on near or full automatic to have any chance of working fast enough against a high-speed missile, and don't normally need any cueing from the other shipborne radar systems. Ironically in automatic they are better at getting fast-moving targets than slow-moving ones in automatic due to the way the control systems work. Slow movers tend to have a human-in-the-loop. The Russian one seems to get the targets when I look at the clip.
There is a lot that is most odd about the Moskva's performance in the engagement itself.
