ZSU Shilka

I placed some A-10s at airfield and directed to circle while I locked onto and fired at them from inside a Shilka.

The A-10 was about 3100m away at 500 km/h and all ammo exploded short of the target. Shilka has max horizontal of 7km and max vert of 5100m.

Not sure how this works out bur would be nice to include current gen mods adding SA-18 and SA-16 SAMs to cover dead zones.

Where did you get those numbers from? Most sources seem to talk about an approximate range of 3km.

These figures are MAXIMUM range, not to be confused with max EFFECTIVE range, which is about 2.5 km. The Shilka is a old foe and though deadly at around 2 km and less, it does use canons which are, like any other canons, short range.

I'm sure the bullets will travel even further than that, that's why I asked where he got those numbers from.

In any case I think DCS is just modeling the effective range to keep things simple, thus the exploding bullets at 3km.

Well i think it's not that simple. How far a shell can travel and how far it can go before it has lost so much velocity that it will loose most of it's punch is bit more involved in explanations. And we have to take excessive dispersion into account. So going back to the Shilka, in simple terms, it will kill you under 2.5 km, but won't hit a barn past 3 km and even if it does, it won't do much arm.

On the topic of the shilka, shouldnt it have the radar-scanning thing like the Gepard etc, rather than just a ranging-type of radar/reticule like the PIVADS does?

Like the green circle with "blips", I mean. I always thought it had literally that inside, but that may be old Operation Flashpoint confusing me :P

On the topic of the shilka, shouldnt it have the radar-scanning thing like the Gepard etc, rather than just a ranging-type of radar/reticule like the PIVADS does?

 

Like the green circle with "blips", I mean. I always thought it had literally that inside, but that may be old Operation Flashpoint confusing me :P

Well according to the documentation of SAM Simulator (afaik the best public simulator for those devices) this is how the radar of a ZSU-23-4V1 works: "During target acquisition, the 2° wide pencil beam of the antenna mechanically scans a 15° sector, vertically" And "During target tracking, the pencil beam of the antenna is conically scanned around the tracked target, mechanically"

So I take it while acquiring you'd have to adjust the azimuth manually while the radar scans 15° of elevation automatically and provides ranging information for anything it detects.

When tracking the radar will automatically follow a single target while circling the radar beam around it.

So the ZSU does not have an automatic 360° scan but relies on a 9S482 Mobile Air Defense Command Post to provide an overview over the target situation.

For more details download the SAMSim documentation (theres a version of the zsu docs on scribd) or even the game and see if you have it in you to operate an almost real ZSU-23-4.

It's fascinating the detail we have on these old weapons systems now. I wonder what the range and performance of a modern optical system is?