OTO Melara 76 mm


The OTO Melara 76 mm gun is a naval gun built and designed by the Italian defence company Oto Melara. It is based on the Oto Melara 76/62C and evolved toward 76/62 SR and 76/62 Strales.
The system is compact enough to be installed on relatively small warships. Its high rate of fire and the availability of several types of ammunition make it capable for short-range anti-missile point defence, anti-aircraft, anti-surface, and ground support. Ammunition includes armour-piercing, incendiary, directed fragmentation effects, and a guided round marketed as capable of destroying manoeuvring anti-ship missiles. It can be installed in a stealth cupola.
The OTO Melara 76 mm has been widely exported, and is in use by sixty navies. It was favoured over the French 100mm naval gun for the joint French/Italian project and FREMM frigate.
On 27 September 2006 Iran announced it had started mass production of a naval gun named the Fajr-27, which is a reverse-engineered Oto Melara 76 mm gun.

Other specifications

Compact

The original version has a rate of fire of 85 rounds per minute.

Super Rapid

The Super Rapid or "Super Rapido" variant, with a higher rate of fire of 120 rounds per minute, was developed in the early 1980s and remained current as of 2020. The Super Rapid's higher rate of fire was achieved by designing a faster feed system.

Strales System

The Italian navy preferred the improved Super Rapido with Strales System and [|DART ammunition] to the Fast Forty 40 mm CIWS in the anti-missile defence role as it is capable of countering several subsonic missiles up to 8,000 meters away. It is a medium caliber gun with relatively long range, and can also be used against surface targets.

Ammunition

To provide multiple roles for the gun, OTO provides the user with wide ranges of specialised ammunition:
There were evolutions in the gun's fire control systems as well. The early versions utilised radars such the RTN-10X Orion ;
From the early 1980s there was a more powerful and flexible system, the RTN-30X, that was capable to manage both guns and missiles. This system came in service with the Italian Navy, on the cruiser Garibaldi, but still with the twin 40 mm Dardo's turrets; while the first ship equipped with Dardo E and 76 mm Super Rapido was the upgraded s, later followed by the Durand de la Penne class. The 76/62 has also been used with countless other fire control systems, when not being used in the Italian fleet.

Fuzes

There have been many developments in the fuzes, essential to shoot down low-flying missiles. The best fuze developed for the 76/62 guns is arguably the 3A-Plus programmable multi-role fuze, manufactured by Oto Melara and Simmel Difesa, introduced in the early 2000s. This fuze requires the installation of a fuze programmer in the mount.
The programmable multi-role fuze features several modes including a time mode for air burst and a number of proximity modes: gated proximity, anti-missile proximity, conventional air defence proximity and anti-surface proximity.
The fuzing includes a DSP which rejects ground/sea clutter and so is capable of detecting a missile flying as low as two meters above sea level. It has the capability to recognise a target at a 10-meter stand-off. In all, the fuze greatly increases the effectiveness of the gun when engaging anti-ship missiles.

DART

Since the 1980s efforts were made for development of guided 76 mm ammunition, but this was not achieved until recently. The first such ammunition was the CCS, also known as 'CORRETTO'; a joint program of OTO and British Aerospace. Work started in 1985. The projectile had several small rockets in order to deviate the trajectory. Radio commands were sent from the ship FCS. The FCS did not know the exact position of the projectile, only that of the target. This system was too complex and unreliable, so OTO studied another development in order to obtain a real 'guided ammunition'.
The result of this development is a system which was called DAVIDE just for the Italian market and STRALES for export purposes while the fired guided ammunition is called DART.
The DART projectile is similar in many aspects to other hyper-velocity systems, for example the Starstreak SAM missile's multi-dart warhead, but is a guided gun projectile with radio controls and a proximity fuze for low level engagement. DART is fired at, can reach 5 km range in only 5 seconds, and can perform up to 40 manoeuvres. The DART projectile is made of two parts: the forward is free to rotate and has two small canard wings for flight control. The aft part has the 2.5 kg warhead, six fixed wings and the radio receivers.
The guidance system is Command Line of Sight. It uses a TX antenna installed on gun. The radio-command for them is provided on a broadcast data-link.
The first lot of DART 76mm guided ammunition, produced by OTO Melara, was successfully tested at the end of March, 2014. The firing trials were conducted on board one of the Italian Navy's ships equipped with Strales 76mm SR and Selex NA25 fire control system. The first firing trials of the DART ammunition bought by Colombia in 2012 were successfully conducted in the Caribbean Sea on 29 August from the 76/62 Strales inner-layer defence system fitted to its modernised FS 1500 Padilla-class frigates.

VULCANO

The more recent development is the VULCANO 76 ammunition system. Basically, it is a scaled down version of the 127–155 mm Vulcano family of extended-range projectiles developed by Oto Melara; guided by Inertial Navigation System and Global Positioning Systems, it is capable of hitting targets twice the distance of normal 76 mm gun ammunition. GPS-IMU guidance and IR or SALT Terminal sensor

Other uses

Most of the basic ammunition types offered for the Oto Melara 76mm can also be fired from the South African Rooikat armoured car with slight modification to change from electric to percussion primers. This is the only land-based vehicle system capable of deploying the same ammunition as its naval counterpart.

Operators

Platforms using the Oto-Melara 76 mm include:

Asia

patrol vessel LÉ Niamh