BAE System’s Bofors Mk4 Naval Gun To Undergo Sea Trails

BAE Systems’s Bofors Mk4 naval gun is all set to undergo sea trails on the Swedish Navy patrol boat. The Bofors Mk4 gun, developed by BAE’s Global Combat Systems business and are lighter, is a cheaper and smaller version of their 40mm naval gun. The 40mm naval gun is embedded with latest technology components to the design, including replacing the hydraulic directional system with an electronic targeting system. The 40mm naval gun can be fitted on vessels as small as 25 meters, compared with the 40-meter limit of the Mk3. The Swedish Navy has provided the 35-meter patrol boat and BAE has provided the gun for the trail. Denny Petersen, the head of integrated naval systems technical sales at Karlskoga, said, “The design parameters to develop a smaller, lighter and cheaper gun without losing any of the performance of the Mk3 variant have been largely exceeded. The target was to reduce weight, volume and cost by 40 percent compared with the Mk3. In the case of weight and cost, we actually achieved 50 percent savings, and with volume, we were almost at the 40 percent mark”.