On Chinese warships, it is common to be equipped with a very powerful domestic close-combat system, the Type 730 and its variants.
Today’s threats to warships from the air, surface and underwater will influence naval warfare theory for years or even decades to come. For air threats, multi-layered defense remains fundamental in naval warfare, where a close-in weapon system serves as a last line of defense to detect and destroy incoming short-range missiles and enemy aircraft which have penetrated the outer defenses. Nearly all modern classes of warships today are equipped with some type of CIWS.
On Chinese warships, it is common to be equipped with a very powerful domestic close-combat system, the Type 730 and its variants. The Type 730 or H/PJ12 is a 30 mm 7-barreled Gatling gun system mounted in an automatic turret and guided by radar and electro-optical tracking systems. The radar and fire control system are entirely domestically produced.
The system’s primary purpose is defense against anti-ship missiles, and other precision guided weapons. However, it can also be employed against fixed/rotary wing aircraft, ships and other small craft, coastal targets, and floating mines.
The Type-730 looks exactly like the Dutch Goalkeeper CIWS. It is likely that China copied the design of the Goalkeeper, then replaced the Western weapons and radars with domestic Chinese versions. Another source confirmed that the Type-730 used many technologies taken from the French Sagem SAMOS system. The complete version was replaced by the domestic OFC-3 EO model.
Type-730 is equipped with a TR47C radar, incorporating a total of 169 transceivers of phased array technology that enables the radar to pick up the splashes of 30 mm rounds. Like the western CIWS, the information is processed on site, via local computers of the radar and the gun mount, thus providing faster reaction time than the Russian design in which the radar and fire control system are separately located.
The system can track a sea-skimming target with 0.1 square metre radar cross section at 8 km, extended to 15 km if the radar cross section is increased to 2 square metres, and further extended to 20 km if the radar cross section is increased to 10 square metres, though the targets could not be engaged until much closer due to the limited range of the gun.
The 30 mm Gatling gun mount is extremely similar to the General Electric GAU-8/A Avenger. Although there are sources claiming that it is the Chinese version of the Russian Gryazev-Shipunov GSh-6-30 Gatling gun. Type-730 has a maximum rate of fire of 5,800 rounds per minute, an effective range of 3 km. The radar can detect cruise missiles from a range of 8 km. That gives the Type-730 15-20 seconds to lock on and fire on subsonic missiles. This time will be much reduced if confronted with a supersonic missile.
So far, the Type 730 has been fitted on China’s new destroyers and may replace some Type 76 mounts on older combatants. A more advanced variant of the Type 730, the Type 1130, which first appeared on the Liaoning aircraft carrier. The Type 1130 inherits the 30 mm caliber of the Type 730 and has a total of 11 barrels, with a reported rate of fire of 11,000 rounds per minute. It is currently deployed on Shandong aircraft carrier, Type 055 destroyers, Type 075 landing helicopter dock, later variants of Type 052D destroyers and Type 054A frigates, and Type 051B destroyer
