Heavy Wind and Mortars?

[weapon2010]

Is Mortar accuracy affected by heavy winds? I'm to lazy to test it.

[Vanir Ausf B]

Yes.

[Erwin]

Is that confirmed?  My experience is that mortars and other arty tend to be inaccurate to start with - so it's hard to determine if wind is an additional factor.

[Drifter Man]

Yes, and the direction of the wind does not appear to matter.

The mortar was about 400-500 meters to the left from the target below if my memory serves.

[Erwin]

It's unclear to me...  The accuracy seems the same but does the wind increase the spread of the shots?

[Lethaface]

16 hours ago, Erwin said:

Is that confirmed?  My experience is that mortars and other arty tend to be inaccurate to start with - so it's hard to determine if wind is an additional factor.

He just confirmed it.

[Vergeltungswaffe]

Keep in mind that the mortar is to the left of the pictures above.

So the shots with no wind have very little left/right drift, just the typical over/under variance, as you'd expect.

But then, the 2nd and 3rd pictures, with high winds, show that the rounds are drifting in all axes, as you'd expect once again.

Pretty well simulated imho.

[Drifter Man]

On 5/6/2022 at 9:06 AM, Vergeltungswaffe said:

Keep in mind that the mortar is to the left of the pictures above.

So the shots with no wind have very little left/right drift, just the typical over/under variance, as you'd expect.

But then, the 2nd and 3rd pictures, with high winds, show that the rounds are drifting in all axes, as you'd expect once again.

Yes - precisely.

[Erwin]

What I am seeing is that while the spread gets wider with winds, the center of the spread seems to be on target.  So wind only works in one dimension?  Otherwise one would expect the center of the spread to be shifted away from the green target square.  ie in the crosswind example, one would expect the center of spread to be moved more up or down.

[domfluff]

To give this way more effort than it's worth:

Pedantically, the wind doesn't affect "Accuracy", it affects "Precision".



Accuracy is a function of the skill of the mortar team and FO - the more accurate they are, the fewer spotting rounds they'll need to be on-target. The wind will still affect this during the spotting phase, but you're not going to be able to show that as succinctly as in the above screenshots.

Each round is going to be affected by the wind, which will increase its Circular Error Probability - the precision of each round will go down, and the resultant impact pattern will be much wider. This will also be affected by the skills of the operators, as well as things like the barrel temperature.

Now, that's being incredibly pedantic. In normal usage, it's only really important to understand that the wind will make artillery scatter rounds over a wider area, which I think is a reasonable interpretation of the original question.

[domfluff]

And no, the spread won't be shifted in the wind direction, because you're simulating humans firing the thing. Each round is fired individually, and wind speed is taken into account. The adjustment won't be perfect, but that's the reason why windage adjustment exists:



(US 60mm M2 mortar)

The lever/spring assembly here allows you to tilt it left and right to adjust.

Edited May 7, 2022 by domfluff

[Rinaldi]

On 5/5/2022 at 2:10 AM, Erwin said:

Is that confirmed?  My experience is that mortars and other arty tend to be inaccurate to start with - so it's hard to determine if wind is an additional factor.

I have it on good authority that wind is merely a rumour. 

[sid_burn]

Just now, Rinaldi said:

I have it on good authority that wind is merely a rumour. 

The only time I adjust for wind is when I decide to break some in front of people I don't want to speak to anymore.