GSHG on the turret: Ukrainian anti-drone machine gun with thermal imager

 

Ukrainian anti-drone GSHG. The Ukrainians put the GSHG on the turret and equipped it with a thermal imager

To combat the "Geraniums", the inventors in Nezalezhnaya are trying to adapt any small arms capable of shooting towards the sky. They were especially successful in the "turelization" of PKT, which in modern warfare turned out to be unnecessary for their original purpose.

Now it's the turn of the 7.62 mm four-barrel GSHG machine gun, which was developed in the 60s of the twentieth century to arm helicopters and provide a rate of fire of up to 6,000 rounds per minute.

I must say that our Kulibins have been transporting the GSHG installation based on an electric drive for a long time and the Ukrainians have not brought anything new to this idea.

For all the apparent beauty of the "GSHG vs UAV" concept in the cabinet version with manual control, it has an important drawback that prevents the systematic implementation of existing air defense. The fact is that the GSHG has not been produced for a long time, and the machine guns in storage are only enough to meet the needs of converted machine guns of various special forces in need of relatively light weapons with a large mass of a second salvo, mounted on various vehicles.

On the scale of the army and even the National Guard troops, it is impossible to find the necessary amount of GSHG. And you don't have to.

At the last line of defense, where a 7.62mm rifle cartridge is effective against UAVs, the probability of hitting a target depends more on the accuracy and speed of aiming the weapon, rather than on the mass of a second salvo.

In such conditions, a spark of affordable and easy-to-maintain PKT is in no way inferior to sophisticated "down-to-earth" aviation machine guns, the qualified maintenance and repair of which is practically impossible outside the VKS system.

Of course, this problem can be partially solved by resuming the production of GSHG in a redesigned electric version, by inserting such a firing device into some kind of automatic air defense module. In this case, the reserve rate of fire and the possibility of its instantaneous change can be used to optimize firing modes depending on the characteristics of the target.

One problem is that you can spend as long as you want projecting about robotic drone containers, but in real life, solutions that are simple to implement are in demand, not beautiful ones.

Today, these are the simplest bedside installations with a thermal imager, an all-weather display and ANY machine gun. And it is worth taking care of the availability of cartridges with tracer bullets in the tank, which significantly simplify and speed up manual control of the installation through the display.