The 30 mm gun is reliable, of indigenous manufacture, and cheap by implication due to its proliferation across Navy's WJ-FACs/ICG OPVs. Slaved to an electro-optical sight, it can easily take out surfaced submarine periscopes, ESMs, Sonar Domes (polymer) and ensure a mission kill. I'm not sure if it has enough penetrating power to breach the pressure hull, but it can damage everything else. With incendiary tracer rounds things may get more interesting.Philip wrote:
https://www.shephardmedia.com/news/imps ... te-emerge/
The accompanying pic. of the ASW corvette is rather disappointing. A little 30mm "popgun",incapable of inflicting heavy damage on a surfaced wounded sub,and the absence of a heli-deck,easily achievable within the 750t size,which would enable ASW helos to operate from the corvettes from their shore bases,since these corvettes are meant only for inshore coastal,shallow water ASW ops. While the specs. say that a TAS may be provided,and that LWT torpedoes are aboard,just one ASW RBU appears to be the bare minimum.What these corvettes lack which are the approx. size of our erstwhile Nanuchka class missile corvettes and almost double the size of the Pauk ASW corvettes that we operated,are a better ASW sensor and weaponry package.The Pauks carried a larger gun,two sizes of TTs and has a VDS at the stern. Since half are to be built at GSL,we look forward to that design to appear,perhaps it may be an improvement.
These vessels will be used to rapidly lay down a ASW mine barrier across important shipping harbors and ingress/egress channels. Mines are the biggest killers of sneaky submarines (even more than ASW mortars historically, I believe) in confined or shallow waters. Hence the larger hull size than the Pauks. The "Abhay" SONAR which is optimized for small sized shallow water craft, and the new LFDS SONAR for the Dhruv ALHs will probably find their way on these craft...they are too small to deploy full sized VDS/TAS or HMS kit.
Once detected, a single RBU 6000 or LWTs are good enough for sneaky subs on batteries. These craft will be so cheap and numerous that it won't make sense for the submarine to consider deploying Harpoons/Exocets against them.