Oto Melara 76 mm gun It is capable of very high
rates of fire, making it suitable for short-range anti-missile
point defence. Its calibre also gives it abilities for
anti-aircraft, anti-surface and ground shelling. Specialised
ammunition is available for armour piercing, incendiary, directed
fragmentation !!!
85 round/min - is not slow !
If it can take out short range anti missile - it can take out 40
knots speedboats..... and it will not be lucky shot !
In fact both 76mm & 25mm (200 rounds per minute)
both are over kill for terrorist speedboats - they both
can easily take out muliple high speedboat easily .... but in
habour or crowded sea both are too powerful ... as they risk
damaging other ships in the area .....
By the way our boat carry 2 x 0.5 (400 -600 RPM ) which will be
more then enough to do the job.
I think both 76mm & 25mm does have their own adv and disadv
... you cannot say our Patrol boat is wrong to arm
with 76mm.
I do find the combination of 76mm with 0.5s ..... does give us
a perfect combination mix of attack & defense
arment.
Nah, experience has shown that in theory all these words look
nice on paper, but in pratice things can be quite different.
If the "terror" speedboat was a target drone in calm sea states
and you are shooting at it in optimal conditions then prehaps
things will work.
Prehaps if the terror boats approach you piecemeal, then prehaps
you have a chance of stopping it with the 76mm.
The task becomes more complicated if there are multiple bogeys
moving at you at high speed, you are moving at flank speed (to
avoid them), running evasive patterns or worse at high sea states
where the platform is listing from side to side considerably.
In that case, to probability of kill trying to rotate the
entire 76mm turret and slave the heavy gun it to a small, fast
target whose only idea is to ram into you becames exceedingly
small.
This is why the a lighter, faster gun that spews out shells
at over twice the rate is far more suitable for such
applications. Not only is the 25mm gun much, much faster to move,
it is also easier to stabilize as well as being able to keep up a
longer time of fire due to its increased ammunition capacity. For
the COIN/Terror this is the more practical, cost-effective
solution.
.50 is unlikely to work unless you're getting really close, and
at that point the suicide boat is already in its terminal approach,
even if you kill the driver you're screwed if that thing
just triggers on impact.
The problem is also that our 76mm is on the smaller side of
naval mounts, it is kind of a popgun compared to the 5in mounts we
see on the RAN frigates.
I doubt the 76mm is good for point missile defence with modern
ASMs, in fact I've yet to hear of naval mounts being used
effectively in such a role.
