"...Did you not read your Effects Tables each morning before breakfast? " No. To my everlasting shame....but I never missed "Beetle Bailey"! How did they transfer tgt. data to you guys? At what level? By what means? Co-located?

Colocation is a bad idea. CBR blasts out a signal that can be picked up halfway across a continent and has side lobes audible across the state. The signals intel people can DF those things and triangualte location in seconds. The prefered link was wire, radio worked too. The CBR is part of the artillery so it communicated on the same networks, tho there was a 'CBR' circut on the comm plan I only saw it used in corps size ops. When we were runnng as independant battalions or as div arty the CBR unit used the same Admin, Conduct of Fire, and Command radio or wire networks as the other support and tacical sections. Prodcedures varied in detail. In general: Usually the S2 would work out a survelliance plan with the CBR leader in advance. During ops the CBR would stand by until the S2 took in Shell Reports and used those to give the CBR a area to watch. A current Shell Rep would cause the S2 to trigger the CBR, which would activate and find the end points of any trajectory it picked up. These would be passed to the S2 who would plot them and work up a couter fires plan. This would route through the S3 to the brigade/bn FDC & to the firing units.. To provide speedy counter battery fires the CBR could be pre instructed to make a call for fire directly to the unit designated for counter battery fires. This was usually set up when the CBR was oriented on a suspected enemy battery location. Or when the counter battery program had priority (which was often. Usually this call for fire went over the usuall CoF net or circut, tho sometimes a seperate CBR link was used between the CBR & the firing unit. I think Tac Fire could take the CBR data directly from some CBR computers. Not certain there. When we got the Battery Computer System the CBR could link directly to this BCS through the COF circut and squirt the data directly in. The senior responsible FDO could read the grid ect.. off the computer, glance at the map & order Fire or Cancel. Or if the suspected location was already cleared for fire, the fire button on the BCS was hit & we would have our own rounds in the air in a minute or two.

No particular order. Software for auto laying has certainly been a challenge, it had a tendency to hunt and not stabilise in the early days. Some coys cracked it others didn't. An extra 5 mils droop would be noticeble at short range for any charge but insignificant as range reached max. I've never been convinced by MRSI. Lets take first 10 - 15 secs as the period of max effect on a target. That, of course is a target that involves men in the open with the option of taking cover. Now, with ground burst ammo a man improves his survival chances by a factor of about 15 (IIRC) by hitting the ground. However, these days (and for the last 15 - 20 years) most/many western armies fuze all their HE with MRF, so any troops in open target is going to be hit with airburst. Hitting the ground isn't going to help a lot. That means 'troops in open' have got to be near OHP (ie AFVs, wpn pits with a good layer of dirt on top, solid bldgs preferably with cellars), these, of course take longer to get into. In other words MRSI is only useful against a fairly small proportion of targets, and burst fire with airburst is probably almost as good (from mid 70s towed 155mm gave 3 rds in 15 secs or better and the modern SPs give 3 rds in under 10 secs). The downside of MRSI is if you are in a hostile TA environent, where you want to keep your trajectory as flat as possible.

"The downside of MRSI is if you are in a hostile TA environent, where you want to keep your trajectory as flat as possible." Without reproducing details from the tables the low charges on a MRSI certainly produce a high proflie trajectory. We can all be gratefull the Iraqis could not use all that neat artillery related equipment they had.

Damm. I have a document discussing US & Soviet effects tables and illustrations on time-ammo quantity-casualty expectations, but dont know how to attach it to a post here. Its in a PDF file & I am clueless. : (

That sounds a pretty interesting document, email me at [email protected] and I will give you my regular email address.

Yeah, definitely didn't mean to suggest co-locating an emitter like a Q-36 near any sensitive location. What I thought that you indicated was that target data was fed to a sigint element in a MEB staff. Your cueing actions and relationships actually were very similar to ours. We did provide direct wire link to a BCS in a designated battery on a number of occasions...usually threat driven. If the counterfire threat was large, it went into the S-2/Bn FDC first. We'd generate the fire order from there. Normally our Bn. S-2 would define initial cueing zones, and, in general, shape the fire plan with the Bn. FDO, S-3, and Bde. FSO. I always had a direct landline link to our radar, regardless. Can't recall a fire mission generated by CBR over the fire net, though no reason other than wire always went in to their locations. Thanks.

"Can't recall a fire mission generated by CBR over the fire net, though no reason other than wire always went in to their locations." It always seemd the CBR thought the ideal location was beyond the reach of wire. Some times they got away with that line. ; ) When they were on the wire I recall they were simply patched in to the usual COF/Command/Admin loops.

The TA issue is that radars that can locate guns firing low angle (ie an elliptic tractory) are complex. Remember in the early 70s there was a Euro project called Zenda, which failed, it wasn't until some years later that Hughes finally cracked it. There's still only half a dozen or less and they are not widely in service (in global terms). In contrast high angle fire with its parabolic trajectory is dead easy to deal with, nice and slow towards vertex as well. All you need is two points on the traj. While trajectory tracking needs either smarts for auto or a lot of skill for manual, the Foster scanner technique is very easy and I don't think the antenna technolgy is too tricky. Countries like N Korea or Iran would have no problems with it.

Could I get one too? Please. corvusfrugilegus [at] gmail.com