LORAS pushes 155mm guns toward rocket-artillery territory

KNDS has unveiled LORAS, a very-long-range 155mm artillery system family designed to push tube artillery into a range band more commonly associated with rocket-assisted fires and multiple-launch rocket systems.

The LORAS demonstrator is built around a 155mm/58-calibre gun, longer than the 52-calibre standard common to many current NATO artillery systems. Mounted with an automated unmanned Artillery Gun Module on a tracked RCH 155 chassis, the concept is intended to reach beyond current NATO artillery norms while preserving the industrial and logistical pathway of 155mm ammunition. KNDS has presented the system alongside its wider future land-defence work.

Extending tube artillery range is a production-engineering challenge before it becomes a battlefield capability. A longer barrel gives propellant gases more time to accelerate a projectile, but it also changes the stress profile across the gun, chamber, recoil system, ammunition, propellant, barrel life, and maintenance regime. Range figures are only useful when supported by repeatable manufacturing, controllable wear, and ammunition that can be produced in volume.

For manufacturers, longer barrels demand high-quality metallurgy, deep-bore machining, heat treatment, inspection, and repeatable internal geometry. If chamber pressure and propellant energy rise, ammunition and firing tables have to develop at the same pace. Automated loading and unmanned turret systems add robotics, safety logic, sensors, software, diagnostics, and power management to the platform.

European armies are rebuilding artillery assumptions around lessons from Ukraine. The demand profile now includes more guns, longer reach, better survivability, deeper ammunition stocks, faster sensor-to-shooter links, and production systems able to sustain high consumption. Tube artillery is also competing with rocket artillery, loitering munitions, cruise missiles, and one-way attack drones. LORAS extends the economics and familiarity of 155mm fires into a deeper strike envelope.

That industrial landscape is already visible across networked artillery fire-control work, European rocket-capacity expansion, and new 155mm range-extension technology. Range, digital control, ammunition effects, propulsion, and production throughput are being upgraded together rather than sequentially.

The manufacturing risks are just as connected. A long-range artillery system cannot deliver its promised effect if ammunition supply cannot keep pace. Precision munitions add electronics, fuzing, guidance, batteries, environmental protection, and stockpile-life constraints. Conventional long-range ammunition still depends on propellant consistency, casing quality, aerodynamic repeatability, and lot-to-lot control. Barrel life becomes a procurement variable rather than a maintenance afterthought.

Mobility and survivability add further pressure. A longer and heavier gun system must still move quickly, deploy, fire, and displace before counter-battery systems respond. Automated loading can reduce crew burden and improve tempo, but it increases dependence on actuators, sensors, diagnostics, and power systems. The vehicle becomes artillery piece, robotised handling system, armoured platform, and digital fires node in one package.

Europe’s artillery challenge is no longer a shortage of concepts. It is the need for synchronised production across barrels, ammunition, energetics, electronics, fire-control software, vehicles, trained crews, and support capacity. LORAS gives KNDS a credible route into long-range fires, but its value will depend on whether the surrounding industrial chain can support the shot.