Effectiveness of medium caliber naval guns

[giantsquid]

I just finished the very good Tanker War 2017 scenario, involving 4 USN LCS against big numbers of small iranian surface crafts. The fight involves a lot of gunfights, with the LCS dominating the scene with 57mm guns.

I noticed anyway, despite advanced fire control and short range (I often open fire at less that 2 miles from enemy ships) that I had a lot of misses, sometimes bigger than 300-500 ft, not only against 20ft boghammar but against biggest patrol boat too. With the 3P airbust ammunition it should be pretty effective agaist small unarmored targets, but often I have to fire 20 bursts to score a hit. I was wondering if it's very realistic... I have read the excellet naval gunnery combat post and know the target are small fast boats, but projectile time of flight was be less than 2 seconds.
The prob. hit was very low against anti ship missiles too (2-5%). This gun should work pretty well against them, thanks to programmable airburst warhead.

Thanks

[wild_Willie2]

Been there, discussed that

tm.asp?m=3885328&mpage=1&key=gunfire&#3885328

[giantsquid]

Thank you, I have read it in the past. Very interesting, especially the story about the Iran platforms I didn't know.

I found naval gunfire on land targets pretty realistic and tried it in different scenarios. Now I'm more intrigued by naval anti-ship fast firing guns results at close range.

[Luidzi]

I've been very disappointed with the performance of 57mm gun that comes with the LCS against small, fast targets, like Boghammars.
- 80m CEP: no long-range dueling
- 1 DP: even a Boghammar will shrug a single direct hit
- almost zero blast radius: a near-miss, even by 2m, will cause no damage

My personal 3 rules of naval gunfire:
1) I use gun only if there is no other option.
1) If the gun has CEP 10m or less and the kinematic parameters are favorable, I open fire at max range.
3) If the CEP is 80m and higher, the gun has zero chance of hitting anything at maximum range. In this case, if the target is very fragile and can be taken with one hit, I open fire at 10-20% of weapon range, absolutely never further. If the target can take the pounding, I will stick the barrel to the enemy captain's face and fire.

[giantsquid]

OK, I see. My best reference is Harpoon 4 boardgame rules, that preset higher probability of hit.
With airbust warhead you don't need direct hit on soft target like boghammars. Anything within 30 ft should be a kill or heavy damage. It would be nice to have the possibility to select direct hit or airburst too.