I was thinking this exact scenario except 300mm MLRS beyond mid-point of strait onboard naval platform has entire Taiwan island within its range.
PLA Strategy in a Taiwan Contingency
- Thread starter pugachev_diver
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Old-school US coastal defense artillery was sending shells two orders of magnitude below 1200km. The big gun part is perfectly plausible from an engineering standpoint, and bigger ones have already been built—even 400mm has nothing on Gustav. The ridiculous part is the range.
Yeah, modernized rocket landing ships are quite plausible. Certainly more than some super gun.
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Don't look one century back, it's irrelevant. Modern reference program is this one.
That program was cancelled for good reason.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying it's physically impossible. I'm quite confident that you can send a shell that far if you're willing to invest the required resources. What I'm not confident about is the practical utility and cost-effectiveness of doing so with a ginormous gun instead of just using regular old missiles.
For sustained fire it makes sense. Ultimately big gun is nothing more and nothing less than a big, precisely machined metal tool. If you're a good manufacturer, they aren't very expensive.
What it gives is ability to throw big chunks of love, at low price point sustainably and conveniently: artillery propellant charges are rounding error when compared to high energy fuel SRFs, and are very easy to carry around.
You can bring in cheaper srfs too, but then you're looking at Juche-600 mm "MLRS". With corresponding size and propellant expenditure for each throw.
To even get within the same order of magnitude as 1200km, you are most definitely not talking about regular old artillery propellant. You need rockets or ramjets or whatever other exotic propulsion assists, like SLRC had. I daresay your fancy 400mm shell will be using the exact same SRFs, and no small amount of them either.
As far as I understand, most of range comes from glide control and sustainer. I.e. no, normal propellants are fine - especially on a big semi-static gun.
Fancier propellants(or ignition control) for artillery matter when you need to conserve chamber and charge volume. I.e. field artillery problems.
Which is, sustainer
More or less same idea as zumwalt 155, just way more potential energy, energy retention v drag, and volume for boosts. Thus way easier time bouncing off atmosphere.
I am totally fine agreeing it's a controversial development. Just that it can work out, there's no physical limitations broken.
Which is, sustainer
The program didn't get far enough for us to know the technical details of its propulsion. They never even made a prototype. And Zumwalt's guns didn't even make it to 200km.