Artillery Targeting Process

Email Me When A New Comment Is Made
Show Only Poster Name and Title Newest to Oldest

Pages: PREV 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 NEXT

ArtyEngineer RE:Artillery Targeting Process - EW 3/24/2006 10:39:56 PM

"Actually I would have the computer even point the guns. (Sorry) My rationale (and I know nothing about guns) is that how else do you point the barrel?" - EW I dont really want to tell you this but the Fire Control System on Artillery has not radically changed since, well forever. Paladin and the MLRS are the only artillery systems to date in the US inventory utilising an INU and a computer controled laying system, every thing else relys on "Glass and Iron" Sights, and gunners cranking handwheels and centering bubbles (I call it "bubbleology") and to be fair this system can accurately put a tube on azximuth and elevation within 2mils and 1 mil respectively. (Does the Navy work in Mils?) The M777A1 will be the first towed hoitzer in US use which has a digital system, minus electric drives. Those = weight and power requirements.

Quote Reply

neutralizer RE:Artillery Targeting Process - EW 3/25/2006 1:43:21 AM

I've have been on active service with a battery deployed as single guns 10s of km apart (bty front was about 150 km as the crow flies). But it was all fairly static. Dispersion is undoubtedly a good way to aid survival if the CB threat is high, moving around a lot at the same time (eg 'gun manouvre areas') is also good, but the load on the guys is such you can't sustain it for long unless you have duplicate crews. The thing about modern fire control is that you can put the guns wheel to wheel or spread across a few km or anything in between, the tactical situation and the threat estimate basically leads to the answer. UK had re-equipped all their guns by the end of 2002 to remove glass sights (for indirect fire). The important thing is that it eliminates the need for directors/aiming circles, and makes laying more consistent. Onboard calcs may or may not be necessary, they won't help accuracy/consistency (unless they're tied to the MVR and using round to round MV prediction), whether they speed things up a bit is more complicated. Modern computers can comp for a bty in millisecs, and doing it on each gun isn't going to be noticeably faster! The issue then becomes the comms bandwidth and protocols. However, if all the guns get the same fire order msg not unique msgs to each gun then it should be a bit faster (a few secs).

Quote Reply

Carl S RE:Artillery Old Guns vs New 3/25/2006 2:28:41 AM

Maintinance hours & training for mechanics/electrical techs was a important consideration for the Marines a couple decades ago. There is a direct trade off between spare parts and support pers vs weapons when loading the ship. The reliability of the digital gun parts, the self loading mechnisms ect.. did not prove out in field trials. So, we went with simplicity. This included discarding the selfproppelled tracked howitzers. In this case there was a clear increase in training (shooting) time as the repair time vanished. The reliability thing is a serious issue for me. Back in the early 1980s we were still using a large quantity of gear that had major problems. Aside from old worn out stuff there were a lot of over engineered items which took too much effort to keep running. The cute capabilities these things brought were not worth the time. Component reliability is enhanced by the ability to change out critical parts without the need for a specialized technician and tools. ie: if the trigger or indirect fire sight on the M198 failed the gunner could grab either off the gun and install a replacement in a couple seconds.

Quote Reply

Carl S RE:Artillery Targeting Process Speed 3/25/2006 2:48:57 AM

Shaving the seconds off can mean lot to the guy who needs the fire support. For us routing the call for fire from a observers keypad direct to the bty computer then to the gun display was the largest time saver in four decades. The downside was significantly more weight for the observer to pack around. A few more seconds could be cut with a auto loader, but that brings us back to some sort of selfpropelled system, more moving parts & reliability questions, and trading off guns for a little more speed. In any case whatever a fire mission takes currently sounds better than the four - five - or six minutes it took us in the manual era from the 1940s, and way better that the 12 - 15 minutes it took the Wehrmacht artillery back then.

Quote Reply

Carl S RE:Artillery (Does the Navy work in Mils?) 3/25/2006 2:53:52 AM

I thought so. The Navy officers attached to us knew what mils were. But they also knew a lot about minutes & seconds of arc, which were still used for navigation.

Quote Reply

Carl S RE:Artillery (Does the Navy work in Mils?) 3/25/2006 2:54:08 AM

I thought so. The Navy officers attached to us knew what mils were. But they also knew a lot about minutes & seconds of arc, which were still used for navigation.

Quote Reply

Carl S RE:Artillery Targeting Process 3/27/2006 11:36:03 AM

Arty Eng...did nay of this answer your question?

Quote Reply

ArtyEngineer RE:Artillery Targeting Process 3/27/2006 2:37:41 PM

Yes it did, I can better appreciate the complexities of the process and understand now that just because we can do "this this and this" with a digital system it may not be of any real benefit, without every other system being able to interpret, track and display that data to those who require it.

Quote Reply

Carl S RE:Artillery Targeting Process 3/28/2006 7:30:21 AM

One more caveat on the idea of fully automatic loading/firing at the gun. I cant even begain to count the number of times we had a Check Firing because someone had wandered into the closest in danger zone (E). The zone 300 meters in front of the cannon. Everything from lost tank platoons, wandering supply trucks, Japanese SDF companys, heliocopters, PFCs off to relieve themselves. The cannon were usually camoflaged and it was fairly easy to step out of the woods and not see a 155mm muzzle fifty meters away. I only witnessed one casualty in 20+ years. Our senior medic suffered a 60% permanent hearing loss when he got a little disoriented moving from one gun pos. to the next. Had the crews not had the ability to instantly check firing the injury rate would likely have been ten times that.

Quote Reply

S-2 RE:Artillery Targeting Process-Carl S. Reply 3/28/2006 5:50:39 PM

"...we had a Check Firing..." Somebody who remembers that the proper command is "Checkfiring", not "checkfire", as so often heard. Bravo, fellow redleg.

Quote Reply

PREV 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 NEXT