Rocket Artillery to inaccurate?

[Tero]

Originally posted by Andreas:

These guys simulate a four launcher battery firing four salvoes before PUFOing to avoid CBF.

The RL reload cycle is what, 8 minutes. Your simulation was a simulation of 4 batteries firing. Could you do a control test with only one battery ?

Did you spread the aim points or did you concentrate them to one spot ?

British casualties:

102 (30 KIA)

2 Mortars

5 Vehicles (carriers)

1 gun

534 men okay

IRL, I believe that this battalion would not have made it off the startline, due to the very heavy casualties.

4,7% KIA, 16% total casualties. I would not say the casualties were especially cripling. What was their morale status ?

Bit arbitrary test, but it seems alright to me - based on the account of a Soviet infantryman in Lucas' 'War on the Eastern Front'. I think the Nebelwerfer works almost exactly like it says on the tin.

Can you give specifics on the Soviet force ? How and where were they deployed ? How heavy casualties did the Soviets suffer ?

[Andreas]

Maybe not to a Finnish force, but a 20% loss and the resulting confusion would stop any other formation coming off the startline.

The account is in that Lucas book. It was a regiment that was supposed to be a follow-on force to an attack, and was hit in the concentration area. I can look it up tonight, but it was a rifleman telling it, so I doubt there are a lot of figures in there.

I used one aim-point, and I realise this whole setup was highly unscientific. Not more unscientific than Cauldron's flat-out claim that the Nebelwerfer is undermodelled though. I'll repeat it with one battery tonight.

[Cauldron]

Not more unscientific than Cauldron's flat-out claim

and the rest blah blah blah...

I decided not to stand in the middle of a rocket impact zone ( the way I WOULD MODEL IT)to test the verasity of my claim.

I do however have many video's showing an actual rocket launch and subsequent impact ( needeless to say not during actual battle). Both my points ARE valid regardless if you think it is scientific or otherwise.

ta ta

eric

[Andreas]

Well, here is something to chew on Eric. According to the Germans, the Katyusha became a lot less effective once the main lesson was learned, i.e. that they are not precision weapons, and that even a little digging in helps a lot to defeat them. They also lost a lot of their terror that way. This is from one of Glantz' books, IIRC.

Regarding of whether you want to stand there or not, I think we can both agree that this is pretty irrelevant when it comes to discussing a particular weapon's effectiveness. I would not want to stand in a place which is fired at by two guys with rifles. A modern battlefield is a deadly place, regardless of weapons used. I would not have wanted to be in the barrage that I let loose in that small test.

150mm Nebelwerfers are not precision weapons. If used correctly (i.e. in mass, and against a concentrated target in the open), they are highly effective, in CMBO as they were in reality. If used against a dispersed, dug-in target (e.g. a defensive position), they are much less useful. This is what the 210mm and 320mm versions were used for, which according to Lucas had different characteristics in terms of detonation setting. They are no wonder weapon that delivers instant death to anyone in the target zone in CMBO, and I seriously doubt they were in reality.

Otherwise, why bother with producing real field guns?

[JasonC]

My test on a more dispersed battalion target caused 5/6th of a causalty per rocket fired. The other fellows on a more concentrated battalion target caused 1 causalty per rocket fired. Pretty close. Use them right, as a battalion ripple and against a battalion, not one battery against a platoon, and the targeted battalion takes 10-15% causalties inside of two minutes.

Anybody who thinks that is *less* than they really did in the real deal, gets to explain why more than half of all causalties in WW II weren't caused by rockets alone. The Germans fired 5 million 150mm rockets and 1.2 million bigger ones. The Russians fired 17.3 million. Is every one supposed to have clobbered 5-10 people? This will come as news to everyone hit by mortars, tube artillery, tank fire, or machineguns. Where are the 125-250 million rocket causalties?

The reality is any artillery weapon that could inflict a causalty per round fired when the proper target and aim point were supplied (or anything on that order of magnitude), was extremely effective. And they did not average even that high in the real deal, as is trivially obvious from the fact that artillery rounds fired during the war by each side are figures with 1-2 more digits than loss totals. The difference was cover, mistaken targets, harassment fire at locations already left by the enemy, undersized targets, etc.

[ 12-03-2001: Message edited by: JasonC ]</p>

[Redwolf]

The whole point about the rocket artillery was that you could bring down all the rounds before anyone could take (decent) cover, wasn't it?

The nebelwerfers are very cheap. Not the ammo or the infrastructure but the actual tube. Both manufracturing the tube and transporting the tube is cheap. So you can have many tubes in one attack.

So the whole point of the thing is to shoot at something that is on the move or at least preparing to defend from LOS positions (as opposed to dugouts).

[JasonC]

I also re-ran my barrage test using the larger rockets. 210mm and 300mm have essentially the same blast, so I just used the 210s. This time I had 72 rockets from 3 FOs. The target was the same.

The battalion lost 126 men or 14.7% of the force, along with 19 out of 34 soft vehicles, 7 out of 15 mortars, and 1 of the 3 anti-tank guns. The battalion HQ group, 81mm mortar platoon, recon platoon, one company's weapons platoon, and the vehicles of the road convoy, were all resoundingly clobbered. The average losses per rocket comes out 1.75, roughly twice as effective as the smaller 150mm.

If the real performance of rockets were as good as in those tests, German rocket production would have sufficed to hit 6.25 million men. I sincerely doubt they did so, because they probably only got targets that good, accurately targeted, some portion of the time. But there is no reason to suppose CM is underrating their effectiveness, when used as intended. The Russians produced 2.8 times as many rockets as the Germans, though a somewhat smaller mix (some 82s, most 122s, some bigger ones).

Incidentally, the blast coverage of the larger rockets is good enough to used them as single batteries, fired at company-sized targets. You could try the same thing with 2x150mm FOs targeted at the same point, but the larger ones will be more effective against tighter targets, because the gaps between dangerously close points of impact are a much smaller portion of the impact area with ~425 blast than with 164 blast.

[Andrew H.]

It seems like rockets might be perfect for the "preliminary bombardment" turn in CMBB.

[offtaskagain]

<blockquote>quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by Andrew Hedges:

It seems like rockets might be perfect for the "preliminary bombardment" turn in CMBB.<hr></blockquote>

Isn't that what they mostly did in RL? If so, then that means CM is doing a good job of simulating it.

[John Kettler]

Iron Chef Sakai,

The Allies weren't going to use chemical warfare on the Germans unless the Germans used it first. The retaliatory stocks of mustard agent were secretly forward deployed on a Liberty ship which was hit and leaked agent into the water in which many sailors were swimming after their ships sank as a result of a German air raid. Casualties were severe, and the whole incident was suppressed for many years. A book called DISASTER AT BARI finally revealed the truth. If memory serves, Bari is in Italy.

While we're at it, the British were in terrible shape for chemical warfare, but scared the Germans off by feeding them lies through the XX (Doublecross) Committee's network of turned German agents. The Russians had huge chemical weapon stockpiles and pioneered mass use. They even gassed their own people.

Regards,

John Kettler

[Mattias]

Preliminary bombardments are already in the game, in a way. I have had opponents setting up TRP’s on likely setup areas and fire artillery from turn 1 without LOS. On in particular i a tournament used a couple of 150mm rocket spotters to get things started, luckily they weren’t very successful. Had he used heavier rockets it could have been a disaster.

Exactly the kind of ”setup line bombardment” that was possible, and banned by many, in Steel Panthers.

M.

[argie]

<blockquote>quote:</font><hr>Originally posted by John Kettler:

If memory serves, Bari is in Italy.

<hr></blockquote>

I can confirm your memory serves well, at least in this one.