Commonality of Artillery for the Army and Navy

[anthonyp]

The USN's AGS and the canceled NLOS-C used the same barrel and munitions (or were supposed to).

[tigercat]

oops yes a 12.5 inch AA gun would be a bit of a monster although the 12.8cm AA gun was a bit of a beast in itself . I can't believe they did a Zwilling version.

What got me started was Patchwork World . if you're a very small country you'd want to keep costs down by having as much interchangeability as possible.

[proditor]

I think in practice the biggest obstacle is tradition. The engineering is doable, certainly if you develop naval and army versions from the start. You won't end up with much commonality beyond ammo and gun tubes, though.

And that is basically the conclusion everybody has come to.  You simply can't take a land SP Gun turret and plonk it on a ship.  As the Germans found, its doable but as soon as you start to marinise the land turret, you start to lose any real commonality.   They'd be much better off starting with common ordnance and working from there in two seperate directions.  Different mountings, gun houses and finally, a semi-fixed round for the navy to enable speedier autoloading.

That's exactlty what they should do.  But, it probably makes entirely too much sense to be an option. 

[rickshaw]

I think in practice the biggest obstacle is tradition. The engineering is doable, certainly if you develop naval and army versions from the start. You won't end up with much commonality beyond ammo and gun tubes, though.

And that is basically the conclusion everybody has come to.  You simply can't take a land SP Gun turret and plonk it on a ship.  As the Germans found, its doable but as soon as you start to marinise the land turret, you start to lose any real commonality.   They'd be much better off starting with common ordnance and working from there in two seperate directions.  Different mountings, gun houses and finally, a semi-fixed round for the navy to enable speedier autoloading.

That's exactlty what they should do.  But, it probably makes entirely too much sense to be an option. 

Not too much sense.  Just a lot harder than people give credit for.  Part of the problem is synchronising needs.  The Navy needs a ship at point X, the Army needs a new gun at point Y.  Ooops, the Army needs a new MBT, can't spend funds just at that point, they're needed for the MBT project!  The Navy finds that going it alone is too expensive, Oh, well, they'll just carry on with the existing gun, afterall, they have huge stocks of ammunition, a few mountings to start with and everybody knows how to make that one!  The US example is a classic.  The US Navy commits to a new gun. So does the US Army.  The US Army finds developing a new mount to put it in and a new vehicle to carry it all just a tad too expensive so ducks out, leaving the US Navy holding the baby. They aren't impressed.

[proditor]

Granted, but I'm not sure "Hey, that's what we're used to do doing" should ever be a compelling argument.  Standardizing the artillery round would reap some pretty hefty benefits, none of which I've seen outweighed by the merits of inertia.

I think the biggest part of the problem is scope.  Like you said, they suddenly need a carriage or naval mount, and the costs start to escalate, so everyone freaks out and we end up with 3 destroyers that look like ironclads, using specialized ammunition, and a contract to buy 20 of the world's largest underarmed fragile speedboats.

If you set one goal and one priority, you can clear the rest in transition to newer systems and the retirement of old ones once their day is done.  VLS seems to be a decent example of making a common system with "tweaks" available based on circumstances (Older or narrow hull, etc.) and it did pretty well in the Mk41 format for the last couple of decades.