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Subject: Artillery to easily counterd ?
Sucari    10/11/2006 7:35:18 PM
For uses on an active-battlefeild is artilerary to easily counterd ? Milimeter radar can track incoming shells, and almsot imidiatly fire a rocket response as return fire, destroying the offending artilerary.
 
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Carl S       10/16/2006 3:26:03 PM
Looking back @ some of my old notes I see a counter battery mission with 155mm ammunition would shoot somewhere between a bn three & six, depending on the estimated location accuracy, est. size of the enemy battery, est terrain, and the mood of the decison maker.  That translates to somewhere between 54 & 108 rounds in two to five minutes.  How many rounds per minute are THEL type weapons expected to intercept five-ten years down the line? 
 
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Herald1234       10/16/2006 3:38:07 PM
Per M-THEL successor, about half that many in flight, before the capacitor melts or the diode burns out, then they are;http://static.flickr.com/103/271562048_810b2a0e46_o.jpg">

Herald

 
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Carl S       10/17/2006 8:53:29 PM
Captain Sickingers counter battery fires may not have been effective then.  As bn S3 he tended to order all fires to suppression standards.  A bn two was his standing fire order.  I favored the Maj Scott school of nuetralizing the target. His fire plans challenged the logistics officers, and would have burned out the diodes on two of these hypothetical THEL with a fire mission. 
 
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Jeff_F_F       1/18/2007 12:15:05 PM
It seems to me that if we were fighting an enemy with effective counterbattery technology there are a few options.
 
Shoot and scoot : with Paladin it is easy, for our towed forces this is a lot harder.
 
Disposable rocket artillery: This was tried some in WW2, and the modern incarnation is used by various terrorists. Basically you just need a launcher and a rocket, then make yourself scarce once you fire it. For most of the folks using it these days it isn't particularly effective, but if the rockets were GPS guided MLRS rounds, it might be more attractive.
 
Post-launch trajectory modification : I'm sure they'd come up with a better name, but the idea is that if you have guided rounds that can maneuver in flight anyway, you can set them to maneuver immediately after launch. That way the round is on a different parabolic trajectory than the natural ballistic path of the round. You'd want to make sure that the apparent location of the firing unit was someplace that no friendly troops were located in though. Really nasty would be firing on a trajectory that kept the round below the enemy radar until just over enemy troops and then popping it up so that if the enemy counter battery controllers didn't check closely they'd fire on their own forces. Nothing destroys morale like firing on your own troops, except being tricked into firing on your own troops by the enemy.
 
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Carl S       1/18/2007 3:30:50 PM
"Effective" can a subjective or slippery term.  In the artillery service journals & miscl historys I have acess to there are like two or three dozen articals about historical counter battery fires, many at large scale.  At times these were quite destructive with both sides artillery badly hurt.  I'd guess a turough review of the historical record, particularly thoretical expectations vs reality, would give a bit of guidance on the the future. 
 
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neutralizer       1/19/2007 4:37:37 AM
I'd definitely agree with that.  There are a couple of up-front issues - what effects do you want on the HB (ie destroy, neutralise or suppress) and second what are the CEPs of you target acquisition systems.  Destroying arty is very difficult, a real eye opener is the UK WW2 ORS report on attacking GE arty at Boulogne in 1944.  And there are counter-measures, dispersion is the first and 'gun manouvre areas' (or whatever your national term is) are the second and go with it.  Of course CB also has to comply with the first principle of intelligence - 'systematic exploitation of all sources of information'.  Applied to CB and modern acquisition systems this means putting in a lot of effort to 'fix' the targets with sufficient precision in time and space for effective CB fire with an achievable objective.  Incidentally I define effective as 'doing the right thing' and efficiency as 'doing the thing right'.
 
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Herald1234    About laser interception of artillery shells.   1/19/2007 4:58:14 AM
This may work in the near term, when M-THEL or its successor comes on line, and it will almost always work for thin walled rockets when you heat fatigue the motor casing, but the correct counter to a laser is to coat your artillery shell with a simple ablative surface. It, the shell only has to survive the laser's heat loading for maybe 100 seconds at most and at the relatively low velocities it travels, the shell won't burn the coating off by air friction. Given a rifled spin and sublimation to act as local radiative heat transport the heatloading can be kept within the explosives' tolerance limits and the shell can be expected to arrive reasonably intact to do its work upon its target.

Such an ablative could be painted on.

Herald

 
 
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Sabre       1/19/2007 11:42:50 AM

This may work in the near term, when M-THEL or its successor comes on line, and it will almost always work for thin walled rockets when you heat fatigue the motor casing, but the correct counter to a laser is to coat your artillery shell with a simple ablative surface. It, the shell only has to survive the laser's heat loading for maybe 100 seconds at most and at the relatively low velocities it travels, the shell won't burn the coating off by air friction. Given a rifled spin and sublimation to act as local radiative heat transport the heatloading can be kept within the explosives' tolerance limits and the shell can be expected to arrive reasonably intact to do its work upon its target.

Such an ablative could be painted on.

Herald

 

Excellent post. Even prolonging the life of an artillery shell painted by a M-THEL is enough to ensure that it's fellow shells can find their target.
 
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Carl S       1/19/2007 11:37:35 PM
One of the misunderstood things about the THELs current effectiveness is the quantity of intercepts it can perform vs the quantity of ammunition it would be faced with.  Knocking down three rounds in quick sucession in the video of the press release looks impressive.  But thats not what one is typically faced with.

The first battalion Ops officer I worked with Capt Sickinger favored target Suppresion.  He typically ordered a bn two as initial atack on a target.  That is two rounds from each howitzer of the twenty four gun bn we were training for.  His predecessor Maj Scott was a bit more profigate (& had only a eighteen gun bn).  I understand his prefrence was for a Nuetralization with a standard of six rounds per gun.  That would be fourtyeight rounds shot in less than a minute in the first case & 108 rounds shot in about 150-170 seconds for the second case.  

A quick look at a translation of a Soviet Nomogram for nuetralizing a similar target shows a even larger allocation.  Over twohundred rounds.  This leads me to the question of how many shots current THEL technology can accomodate?  Can a pair of THEL weapons handle two hundered incoming rounds in four minutes?   One hundred?Fifty? 

 
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neutralizer       1/20/2007 4:39:25 AM
It's actually a bit more difficult than that.  The first salvo will all be in the air together, and will only be vulnerable (ie 'visible') for a proportion of the time of flight.  Furthermore it must be remembered that for whatever reason the US has lots of somewhat 'antique' guns compared to most other 'advanced' nations. These guns do burst fire, at best 3 rds in 9 secs.
 
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