With indirect fire becoming more and more important in the light of recent conflicts lessons learned, ST Engineering is actively pushing the development programme of its Ground Deployed Advanced Mortar System, GDAMS in short, aiming at full qualification in the next semester
The GDAMS was unveiled at DSEI 2023, therefore IDEX was the right moment to understand what happened in one and half year time in terms of testing and evolution. “When we were designing the GDAMS we use digital engineering, so there a lot of modelling and simulation that allowed us to come up with the first iteration of the design, which was what you saw at DSEI. Following that, we did live firing demos and trials to see how the models that we actually built behaved as foreseen in the simulation,” the speaker explained. These tests allowed ST Engineering not only to add some improvements but also to tweak the simulation model increasing its fidelity.
“There was a lot of valuable data that was actually obtained, and from a strength of design perspective, there were some design changes that were put into the design.” The barrel was well proven, and the deployment system allows the baseplate to rest on the ground, so most of recoil forces are absorbed by the terrain, thus no major recoil damping system was needed. “The structure is actually the new piece of the design for this system, and we had to do some changing to it following the first firings in Thailand. “With the forces that we actually encountered, there were some parts of the structure that needed to be changed, while we had to strengthen certain areas.” During those trials the GDAMS was fitted to a commercial car, a Mitsubishi L200 pick up.
The upgraded GDAMS was the installed on a Supacat Jackal high-mobility transporter, as the next trials were aimed at demonstrating the system to a potential customer, the British Army, which has already in use the Supacat platform. Trials were conducted at the Alkantpan Test Range, in the Northern Cape region of South Africa, and were carried out in cooperation with Babcock International Group, which signed a collaboration agreement with ST Engineering in March 2024 with an initial focus on mortar systems, and with Supacat, the platform provider. During the demonstration many types of rounds were fired, high explosive, smoke, and guided munitions, which according to an ST Engineering press release achieved a three-round grouping of 1.1 meters at a range of 5.5 kilometers.
The trials allowed to prove that the change of platform did not affect accuracy and range. The structure was tested in a different condition, the changing done following the first trials being proved. “When we shoot, the majority of the forces goes into the ground, because when we deploy the mortar, the base almost acts like an outrigger, and we actually lift the rear of the vehicle off the ground,” the s company speaker confirms. Depending on the angle a limited percent of the recoil forces goes into the platform, but this didn’t affect the firing results.
ST Engineering will now move to the qualification trials, which will need a few hundreds of rounds to be fired to cope with all the requirements to be verified according to standards. The company aims at qualifying its GDAMS well before year end, possibly before DSEI London that will take place in early September. EDR On-Line understood that trials will be carried out on a Land Cruiser 6×6 provided by a South African Partner, TAC-6, which will also allow proving that the GDAMS is platform agnostic and can be installed virtually on any type of light vehicle capable to carry the system mass, 700 kg, plus the number of rounds required by the customer.
The whole qualification work will also be exploited to further refine digital engineering tools, reducing development time for future systems. Once fully qualified, to qualify it on different platforms will require only certain portions of the process, mostly related to the platform, ST Engineering experts explained; “The main things we have to do are the proof firing, to make sure that when we fire at the highest charges the system and the platform remain intact, the range table verification, so if the if the results are still accurate we don’t have to regenerate the range table, and platform specific tests, mostly related to mobility such as trundling tests and other, because when you load the vehicle with the weapon system and ammunition you have to drive off road and make no issues arise,” EDR On-Line was told.
“Hopefully, in the next six to 12 months, you will start seeing our GDAMS on the back of various platforms produced by different OEMs, because it was designed to be that way,” The ST Engineering speaker concluded.
Photos courtesy ST Engineering