Re: [GZG] Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi! - Artillery

If you're in a position to land artillery pieces, you likely have
ships in orbit. If you have ships in orbit, you're probably laying a
string of commo, surveillance, and navigation sats for your ground
forces.

If not, then not.  As I said, getting into "what ifs" has been
adequately demonstrated to be excessively repetitive and pointless.

But normal artillery survey techniques require fairly good maps of the
area you're fighting over.  The point is that you have to know where
you are and where the enemy is in order to do the math as to how to
get a quantity of explosive from where you are to where the enemy is.
The speed of modern techniques comes largely from computerizing this
process rather than doing manual math or going off paper charts.  If
you don't have a way to do this AT ALL, then you cannot conduct
effective artillery fire AT ALL.

If you presume that the invaders have neither navigation sats nor
precise maps of the invaded planet, then you actually have a LOT of
problems, not merely inaccurate artillery fire.

I leave it to other people to discuss the question of whether there
are alternate techniques available to a force of Hypothetical PSB-Tech
which can pinpoint one's location without sats.  If you know where the
artillery piece is and where the observer is to a high degree of
precision, then with a modern laser rangefinder you can find distance
and direction from the observer.  Calculating the target's location is
a matter of a heartbeat for a computer, and then dropping precision
fire on his head doesn't take long once you have this information.

John

On 7/8/08, germ@germy.co.uk <germ@germy.co.uk> wrote:
> Hi all
>
> Can I just jump in about this point of yours John.
>
> "But modern artillery needs only moments to prepare to fire.	The long
> setup times to conduct indirect fire in WWII were required to
> accurately survey the gun positions, something done by GPS positioning
> nowdays."
>
> In a Sci-Fi planet assault scenario your unlikely to have GPS to rely
on.
> Does modern day artillery without GPS become no better than it's WWII
> ancestor?
>
> Cheers
>
> --
> Jeremey
> www.germy.co.uk
>
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-- 
"Thousands of Sarmatians, Thousands of Franks, we've slain them again
and again.  We're looking for thousands of Persians."
--Vita Aureliani

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