60 mm mortar ammo squawk explained

[John Kettler]

For years now I've seen people sounding off about running out of ammo for a 60 mm mortar team. It happened again over on CoC, so I did a bit of digging and found something informative on the matter. This is how the 60 mm mortar is operated in the field, down to who carries what, in what condition and how much. Also addressed are the ROFs. The team has a whole 36 rounds, and a good crew could exhaust that in but a few minutes. I've read, in various accounts from WW II, Korea and Vietnam, that units valued the mortar so highly the already overburdened rifle squad GIs would each take a round to keep it in the fight longer. Believe the ammo situation was much worse than this for the British 2 inch mortar crews.

http://www.hardscrabblefarm.com/ww2/60mm-demo.html

Regards,

John Kettler

 

[Bulletpoint]

I think the problem with the ammo for the 60mm is not so much the amount of rounds. It's more that we lack better gameplay controls for using those rounds efficiently - at least when playing WeGo.

• The "Target" order means the mortar will keep firing at high ROF until the end of the turn, spending way too much ammo even after the target is saturated.
• "Target light" means extremely low ROF, taking too long to knock out the enemy (and makes it quite easy for them to escape).
• "Target briefly" means you have to correctly guess exactly how many seconds it will take for the mortar crew to get the range, which is impossible, since it varies a lot, and then guess how many rounds they will be able to fire before the target order expires.

Instead, I suggest it should work like real life: Giving a target order to a mortar crew should mean it will automatically fire a couple of rounds to get the range, then fire three bombs rapidly, then stop firing. Next turn, you should be able to target the same spot, and they would then fire three more bombs without spotting rounds (since now they have the range).

[mjkerner]

Bulletpoint, I thought that is exactly what mortars do on Target Light...after spotting, 3 rounds per minute as long as you leaving the Target Light order in place. Although I didn’t count them, that’s what I’m certain was going on last night when my GIs were attacking some town in France...

[Bulletpoint]

22 minutes ago, mjkerner said:

Bulletpoint, I thought that is exactly what mortars do on Target Light...after spotting, 3 rounds per minute as long as you leaving the Target Light order in place. Although I didn’t count them, that’s what I’m certain was going on last night when my GIs were attacking some town in France...

I believe the Target Light ROF depends on distance to target, since the crew will only fire the next bomb after the previous has landed. So longer distance = longer flight time per bomb = fewer bombs launched in a minute.

In any case, the ROF is very low. Especially now that enemies automatically withdraws from HE, it means target light will often just push enemies back.

Perhaps the targeting logic for mortars was designed with realtime play in mind.

[Pelican Pal]

On 7/10/2018 at 8:10 AM, mjkerner said:

Bulletpoint, I thought that is exactly what mortars do on Target Light...after spotting, 3 rounds per minute as long as you leaving the Target Light order in place. Although I didn’t count them, that’s what I’m certain was going on last night when my GIs were attacking some town in France...

The key difference being that 3 mortar bombs landing within rapid succession will grant you greater suppression and a better chance at routing the enemy unit.

1 mortar bomb ever 20 seconds is going to be much less likely to give you a good suppression effect.

[Bulletpoint]

Another idea could simply be to only start counting the seconds for the Target Briefly command after the mortar team has fired enough spotting rounds to start firing rapidly.

So, a Target 15 seconds order would mean you'd get 15 seconds of effective fire, but you wouldn't know how long it would take for the mortar to start delivering it. Would of course be based on troop experience, morale state, spotting conditions, etc.

I think that would be a really nice change.