Agreed.
RIP Sea Mauler
Well, the closest Soviet analogue was Osa-M self-defense SAM system. Albeit I'm not sure, was it designed to fit any specific footprint, or just "be as compact as possible":
Osa-M's magazine and launcher has always baffled me. I really need to find info on the analysis of alternatives because it seems do obviously terrible, especially with the slow reload rate.
Yes, that's a pretty close approximation of what I'd want to install in place of probably half the Bofors 40mm or 3"/50s. Or in this case, in place of half the 45mm radar-guided guns.
And what is an early AShM but an aircraft-sized kamikaze?
That quad 45mm the Russians were using (the SM-7 IIRC), is pretty iffy as a mount. It's huge for the guns (16 metric tons) and has a small ammo loadout of only 16 RPG that are individually reloaded into feed trays. One of the weird characteristics of it is after you fire off like 30 or so rounds, you use what amounts to a firehose with a special nozzle to flood the barrels and cool the guns off instead of using a water jacket like so many other naval guns in that size range do. So, you flood the barrels, cool them off, then resume firing...
Some were smaller, but that's the idea. The US and British solution was to develop a SAM that could engage the bomber--usually a twin engine aircraft in the late WW 2 period--beyond launch range which initially was thought to be about 10 NM. If you couldn't get the bomber then you had to engage and shoot down the missile.
Well, it was basically designed to be compact & fit everything it might be needed. In that regard, Osa-M was a clear sucess. It could be installed even on ships of about 500 tons displacement - and unlike early Sea Sparrow or Sea Chaparral, it was fully automatic system, with automated search/aquisition/track/guide capability:
You probably means SM-20-ZIF? The SM-7 was experimental gun not adopted, the SM-20-ZIF used four ZIF-21 guns.
Wasn't considered a big problem.
No, it was for cooling barrels between long firings.
Yeah, that claim sounds dubious from the start. The Soviets well known for overbuilding stuff could make a barrel thin enough to require manually fed coolant every burst?
Normally, the barrels were air-cooled. But after prolonged firing, the heat buildup was too great and could affect ballistics - so the "fit the hose into breech and pump the water through the barrel" was implemented.
That's the one. It is listed as the SM 7 on Navweaps and elsewhere while the SM 21 was a single barrel model and SM 20 a prototype of the SM 7 that didn't go into production. Of course, this could be wrong too.
Everything I've read says 30 to 50 rounds then you need cooling. But even if it's 100, the cyclic of those guns is like 100 to 150 rpm per barrel. What I'm seeing is it needs cooling after 30 to 45 seconds of fire. That's a crippling design flaw if you ask me. It's fine for one target, but if you have multiple ones or one you open up on one at longer range that's closing, you're pretty much hit.
The SM-7 was the gun that was planned to use in the mount. It was not adopted, the ZIF-21 gun was used instead. The complete system was called SM-21-ZIF.
Could you show me the sources, please?
Yes, it was a problem. On the other hand, the 57-mm ZIF-75 was even bigger)
Yeah my point was more that the missile and radars were quite solid for the time (especially once MA2 came online) but the launcher's low rate of fire really lowered the saturation limit.
True, but self-defense systems generally aren't supposed to ward off saturation attacks anyway.
