crumber

Thanks for the link spectre. My ignorance is as the mountain, worn away over time by words of wisdom such as yours. Still, in the interests of maintaining an attitude of heakthy skepticism - I reckon you'd have to be a marine or Steve Irwin to even consider the prospect of prodding the business end of live ordinance whilst its in the barrel. And the recoil on a 3lb round must just about dislocate a hip. Is the fuzing on these rounds only effective after the propellant fires (you know when they whack the mortar rounds on the steel plate in Saving Private Ryan - prior to pitching them at the baddies)? cheers crumber

As I understand it, a mortar is a cheap, light means of delivering a relatively large amount of explosive with good accuracy - it achieves the accuracy with a high trajectory ballistic arc, the lightness results from not having a high muzzle velocity (hence no need for a heavy barrel), nor a breech (it is a muzzle loader). If the mortar is required to be used at the horizontal, or near horizontal, the projectile is unlikely to achieve sufficient momentum in its travel down the barrel to enable the percussion cap at the projectile's base to fire and ignite the propellant (thus, get someone to shove it down with a stick). I can understand that modifications might be made to make a mortar into an AT weapon, but it would seem likely that this would at least involve a complete re-engineering of an already effective weapon, to make it multi-purpose.

How did you get the thing to fire - get someone to shove the bomb down the tube with a stick?