After a couple of kicks at the cat......

[Rob Deans]

All the stuff I am saying has been disscussed before, prior to the demo, which is truly a good game.

The offboard artillery. My point is this. I was a bit dissappointed in the artillery model. I don't know if this stems from inaccurate information during development or missinterpretation of that info. I called in some 105 fire on a platoon in a copse, as every body has. "TOT 3 min...".........Wow thats fast......A couple of turns now, getting closer......Splash!....First few rounds land on target. Excellent....few more booms....Camera shakes....zoom out.....replay....rounds are landing 300m away! + and - the target, left and right......I must admit I was anticipating something different. I hate bringing up the same point but artillery fire gets, by nature, more accurate as adjusting goes on. The FFE is of regular dispersion. Once artillery fire is "ON" it stays ON. There are not "wingers" at 300m away on a regular basis. After seeing the menu and seeing normal and "dispersed" shoots I was salivating. Is this the artillery model I've been advocating and waiting for? No......it wasn't. Now I don't know everything but what I know I know. If this is far fetched then let me know. What I was hoping for was something like this, and it would seem to fit into the engine as it is now. When the fire is called the routine would go as follows. In two minutes a single round lands (adjustment) This is where the "wingers" would be expected. Every minute after that another single round lands, getting closer as each round is fired. When the fire is "on" the fire unit fires on that target in either a Converged or a Dispersed distribution of fire. The effect ammo is on the target and does not stray from the target. Now, a few caveats........

1. The ability of the FOO is measured by the number of rounds the routine takes to get on target. An elite FOO will take two or three. A total idiot will take five or six. At a minute per round that makes difference. Remember, the player does not handle the adjustment, the computer does.

2. The dispersion <of the appropriate distribution of fire> of the rounds is governed by the ability of the mortarmen on the line (offboard). Green mortarmen would result in a couple of erring rounds. Good mortarmen would be spot on. To have rounds flying all over the place, seemingly in a wide, ramdom pattern as in this, seemingly abstracted, indirect fire system seems to be out of place in this superior game.

3. The overlying "PRO" to a system as has been outlined is it does not in any way detract from the game. It is no more complicated to the player than the existing one. The difference is in the overall time to FFE (too short as it is now) and the proposed system has the correct look and feel on the ground as the player is playing.

I really love this game, don't get me wrong. When I first played SP I thought how cool it would be to be able to watch the game in real time from any angle. *POOF* TA-DA...Thanks guys.

Rob Deans

[Brian Rock]

This seems to make sense - it certainly matches what I know of modern artillery (which is terrifyingly accurate).

The adjustment/FFE phases you suggest make sense, although I must say I haven't observed the current process critically to see exactly how CM handles this.

As for dispersion, what do you think would be a reasonable dispersion for spotted 105mm shells? What about other guns? Any reference material you can suggest here?

[Guest JonS]

umm, guys, have a look at the "retargetting arty thread"

JonS

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Quo Fas et Vino du Femme

[Doug Beman]

Rob, you're presuming a level of gun-uniformity that just didn't exist in WW2 artillery. Every gun was slightly different; slightly bent barrels, worn rifling, out-of-kilter aiming controls; all combined to ensure that no two guns would line up with each other exactly. The shells were not uniform; some had SLIGHTLY less powder, some may have had a SLIGHTLY different shape. Differences in ambient conditions also change things. (the M1A2 has a wind and temp sensor so the targeting system can correct for these factors!)

These differences mean that 2 guns firing with the same readings shown on their aiming devices will almost never land their rounds in the same bucket. Start with a difference of a fraction of a degree and carry it out over typical artillery ranges and that's where the wingers come from.

Example:

Two mortars are firing at a target 4000m away. The aiming devices on both guns show spot-on targeting, but only one of the guns themselves is pointing dead-on. On the other gun there's a .5 degree difference between what the aiming device displays and the gun's actual azimuth. (So there's a .5 degree difference between the actual gun-aiming of the two mortars) Trigonometry will show that the the perfect mortar's shell will land dead on, but the shell fired from the other mortar will be something like 35m away from the aiming point (to one side or the other)

And that example only deals in errors in gun-azimuth mechanisms; things like shell-powder variations and errors in the gun-elevation mechanism will compound each other.

Plus which, the guns will shift EVER so slightly after each firing. Unless the cannon-cockers retarget the guns after each shell, you're going to get errors from that.

Arty just isn't very precise.

DjB

[Rob Deans]

35 metres is fine, 50 m is fine but 300? And 300m in all directions? PEs take variables into consideration and the accuracy of a mortar is way under 300m. What I was referring to was a more uniform dispersion of rounds. I was talking to an "old boy" the other day and he was talking of a time when they stonked a farm yard at 2000m in Italy. They converged the 3" mortars and leveled the place with 4 rounds (per tube of course). If these weapons were so inaccurate then why was adjustment used at all?

Rob Deans