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

I'm replying to several posts at once here. John Atkinson wrote:

>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.

And if you happen to be the defender, you nav/com-sats are likely to be 
destroyed by the invader. However, there are other navigation
technologies 
than GPS that work fairly well already... and they'll most likely get at

least a couple orders of magnitude better in a not too far future, so
I'm 
not too worried about a future defender's ability to know his exact 
location either :-/

>But modern artillery needs only moments to prepare to fire.

With "moments" meaning "stop, determine own and target's location, fire
3 
rounds with high degree of accuracy and get moving again in less than a 
minute". (Or was it "in under 30 seconds"? Can't remember atm. Damn 
quickly, anyway.)

>Flip side, nothing is perfect.  There are techniques to mitigate the
>effectiveness of artillery.  In the future there will be more,
>especially as it is now technologically possible to reliably shoot
>down projectiles on a ballistic trajectory.

At the moment that is rather expensive, with IIRC about a hundred 20mm 
counter-rounds fired at each incoming shell. It shouldn't take that long
to 
improve on that ratio though.

>Radar also can now give
>you the location of a hostile weapon system before the round
>lands--and if the point of origin isn't in a city full of civilians
>your ROE doesn't allow you to blow up, the counterbattery makes the
>entire battery a one-shot weapon.

One thing to note here is that it takes a while for artillery rounds to 
arrive; so even though the counterfire can be *launched* within 15
seconds 
of the outgoing rounds being fired, it usually won't *arrive* until at 
least a couple minutes later... by which time the target battery has 
probably already moved a fair bit away from their firing position :-/

(Which is why MLRS is currently a favourite counterbattery weapon - if
you 
blow up a square kilometer or so centered on the enemy battery's latest 
firing location, you've got at least a reasonable chance to hit it. But 
like John said, it isn't politically correct to do that over a nominally

friendly city...)

>Even in 1944-5 'technologically equivalent' was only
>rough, as US artillery and air support techniques were far more
>advanced than the German ones,

I'd suggest that availability was at least as important a factor as how 
advanced the techniques were, though... the US had both artillery and
air 
support available in huge amounts in 1944-5; the Germans had very little

air support and not very much artillery :-/

>...I'm just tossing them out
>there as examples, that it is easier to argue for artillery becoming
>more lethal than it is to argue for it becoming less lethal.

Well... it is easy to argue for artillery becoming more *accurate*, 
certainly. However, anti-artillery area-defence systems for ground
forces 
have only just entered service, and when they shrink in size and start
to 
proliferate I suspect that artillery will begin to *lose* lethality
again 
as more and more rounds fail to reach their target. That's definitely
one 
of the SF features Drake got right in the Slammers books :-/ (And no, 
skewing the trajectory won't help the incoming rounds all that much -
they 
still have to clear the horizon *somewhere*, and when they do they're 
vulnerable to the defence systems.)

BTW, area-defence systems capable of destroying incoming artillery
rounds 
within a few hundred or maybe even a couple thousand meters above the 
ground are *not* necessarily capable of destroying aircraft that both
fly 
much higher and are much tougher targets than artillery rounds. The 
defences would most likely be able to shred any bombs or missiles
dropped 
by said high-flying aircraft though :-/

As for game designing artillery to be weak, why just PSB it? Put the 
anti-arty defence system in the game explicitly and see what happens 
instead - that's a lot more fun <g>

Later,

Oerjan
orjan.ariander1@comhem.se

"Life is like a sewer.
  What you get out of it, depends on what you put into it."
-Hen3ry

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