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.

That was my Dad's job, in the Western Desert in 1941-43; Royal 
Artillery, Battery Survey Party for a 25pdr unit (and later on 5.5 
inch guns). A bunch of blokes with a couple of jeeps and a 15cwt, 
whose job it was to scout and survey the gun positions for the next 
engagement. I still have some of his tables, notebooks and a 
double-cursor slide rule with gunlaying data on the back....

Jon (GZG)

>
>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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