On December 23, 1965, the Soviet Air Force announced the adoption of the gsh-23 23mm double-barreled aircraft cannon. It is still the active equipment of the Russian Aerospace Force.
Although the development of this new type of aircraft gun was successful, it was based on the long-term and hard work of engineers from multiple design bureaus since the early 1950s. The successful Arkady Georgievich Shipunov and Vasily Petrovich Gryazev, recent graduates of the Tula Mechanical Institute, had just arrived in Kri, Moscow Region Work at the Central Institute of Precision Engineering in Movsk.
After checking the combat performance of existing single-barreled aircraft guns, two young engineers quickly came to the conclusion: "...if you want to increase the rate of fire, you need to increase the number of barrels, otherwise It would be impossible to succeed." According to Vasily Petrovich's memoirs, the two of them decided to develop a double-barreled aircraft cannon, because this method can ensure that the barrel has a higher barrel life under the premise of a high rate of fire. And this is one of the design requirements of the new aircraft gun.
This difficult development path took them nearly ten years from coming up with this idea to actually realizing it. The two people worked almost day and night with little rest. At the end of 1954, the first prototypes began to be assembled, and then a phase of technical and design improvements began, with the firing mechanism alone being redesigned five times.
Even in 1959, when the first mass-produced GSH-23 aircraft gun was assembled, Vasily Alexeevich Deggarev, who lived in the city of Vrov, based on the actual test Performance, further improvements are deemed necessary to address newly discovered deficiencies. In 1962 Arkady Georgievich Shipnov was appointed head of the Tula Central Design Bureau No. 14 (tskb-14).
At that time, his colleague and good friend Vasily Petrovich Gryazev also worked remotely to improve the design of the aircraft gun. Just four years later, Gryazev was transferred to Tula, but at this time, the GSH-23 cannon had been officially in service for nearly a year.
Due to the use of two barrels, it has a considerable number of common mechanisms and components, while ensuring that the size and weight are closer to a single-barreled machine gun. Due to the use of Gast's principle, the two gun barrels fire alternately, allowing the theoretical rate of fire to reach 3200-3400 rounds/minute, which greatly exceeds the performance of the 23mm aircraft gun currently in service in the Soviet army.
gsh-23 Arkady Georgievich Shipnov and Vasily Petrovich Gryazev pioneered more than half a century in Tula, the arms capital of the Soviet Union/Russia. With a history of joint design, they subsequently jointly developed a large number of weapons and equipment.
gsh-23 aerial cannon first became a fixed weapon on MiG-21 fighter jets, and was later equipped on MiG-23, Yak-28, Yak-130, Su-15, Su-17 and other fighters and trainers. Not only that, Ka-25, Ka-29, Mi-24vm, Mi-35m helicopters.
The Ilyushin-76m transport aircraft, Tu-22m and Tu-95ms strategic bombers are all equipped with this kind of aircraft cannon. Following the GSH-23 aerial cannon, Gryazev-Shipunov weapons occupy a dominant position in almost all military equipment on land, water and air.
