counterbattery fire? explanation

[coe]

can anybody explain how this works?

In squad leader you could use your fire missions

to surpress enemy artillery. But how would you

find the enemy artillery guns in the first place?

(without piper cubs all over the place) let alone

which were the actual guns firing at your guys

in the field.

[Captain Wacky]

This is not modelled in CM because all arty pieces are located off the map

[Mattias]

Firstly, like the Captain said, it's not modelled in CM.

However, the fact that the artillery is off map does not prevent the inclusion of it in the game. Counter battery fire is, for example, implemented in Steel Panthers, a game that has many similarities to CM as far as context and scale goes (SP I that is).

It is simply a matter of making a formula calculating the chance of "spotting" and engaging enemy off board artillery with ones own off board artillery, the actual exchange being abstracted to a, for example, report of some kind.

Back in WWII enemy batteries were spotted and cross referenced by a host of methods, beside aerial recon that is. Some examples are by listening for the sound of the guns or looking for the smoke or flashes from the guns. You could also look at the craters and estimate the probable direction of the incoming round. Beyond that you had spying, LRRP's (well, sort of) and radio/telephone interceptions etc etc etc

All the data would be gathered and tabulated by specialized units and, hopefully, sent off in time to deliver the counter battery fire.

--

We have a few experts in the field on this forum, who no doubt can clarify further.

M.

[gibsonm]

Originally posted by coe:

can anybody explain how this works?

In squad leader you could use your fire missions

to surpress enemy artillery.

I think this was a way to represent higher formations re-allocating fire missions for CB tasks.

At Div and higher CB is the priority task (IIRC) and there are usually dedicated assets for this task. In SL your X missions represented that Squad Ldrs "share" of arty. You could then use some of this share for CB and some for spt. In CMBO the CB tasks are already netted out and your allocation is just that "yours" for you to use on direct spt tasks related to your mission.

After all the best you will have is an FO or two not an Arty Regt HQ or DIV Arty cell with the nets and assets to conduct CB.

[gibsonm]

Bad keyboard day

[ April 06, 2002, 04:53 PM: Message edited by: gibsonm ]

[gibsonm]

double post

[Michael Emrys]

Originally posted by gibsonm:

At Div and higher CB is the priority task...

I would be surprised if any army of WW II regularly devoted any division assets to counter-battery fire. IIRC this was most often handled at the corps and sometimes army level. It was often a major target for the airforce as well.

It might be interesting to model in CM in a way somewhat similar to ASL, giving a player an option to devote some portion of his support to suppressing the enemy's artillery. But it seems to me that there would only be a limited number of special circumstances where that would be realistically applicable. I think CM is mostly concerned with situations where counter-battery fire has already occurred or would not be likely to occur.

Michael

[Andreas]

You can start the technicalities by having a look at the 'beobachtungsabteilung' link in my sig. Also, if you go there go to the links page, and choose the first one 'sounds like the enemy'. some more info. Piper cubs are no good to spot for counter-battery, for reasons that will become apparent when you read the site.

[L4Pilot]

Originally posted by Andreas:

Piper cubs are no good to spot for counter-battery, for reasons that will become apparent when you read the site.

Gonna take issue with that one. Although they wouldn't use the same sound and flash triangulation methods utilized by ground based counter battery location methods, thay seemed to do just fine by direct observation.

Here's some quotes from Ken Wakefields "Fighting Grasshoppers":

"When we were ten miles or so behind enemy lines - where we had to go to find the enemy batteries - it was a long way to go to get home."

"Within the next week my observer and I destroyed at least ten enemy gun batteries..."

"The [Air OP] patrols also served to served to minimize German artillery activity as the enemy was inclined to withhold fire when Air OP's were in the vicinity; the Germans quickly discovered that to fire, and be observed, was to invite massive retaliation from US batteries."

Andreas, I do appreciate your providing the info at your site re: the counter battery location methods used when you don't have the luxury of some Piper Cubs flitting about.

[SpazManOught]

Originally posted by Mattias

You could also look at the craters and estimate the probable direction of the incoming round.

I know some of this stuff has been discussed before but can the above be done? I studied Meteorite impact craters at Uni and some of their most striking characteristics are that they are all circular with flat bottoms no matter what the angle or speed of impact. Turns out that at the point of impact a huge explosion occures due to super heating this destroys the original crater made by the impact and replaces it with a larger explosion crater which is circular. The flat bottom is caused by the resettling of vertically ejected material and due to the interior of the Earth pushing the crust back up. So in effect the crater caused by an artillery shell is a blast crater and not an impact crater and thus you would not be able to tell from whence the shell came.

Nasa's guide to craters

Make your own crater

Try this if the gif dont show.

[JonS]

Originally posted by SpazManOught:

I know some of this stuff has been discussed before but can the above be done? I studied Meteorite impact craters at Uni and some of their most striking characteristics are that they are all circular with flat bottoms no matter what the angle or speed of impact.

Yes it can. A while back someone posted a link to the US Army Pam explaining how it is done if you really want to follow it up. Seach under CB, or Counter Battery, here and on the General Forum.

WRT metorites, you are talking about several orders of magnitude (at least!) more energy in a meteorite event as compared to an artillery or mortar round. Artillery doesn't 'liquify' the ground.

Regards

JonS

Edit: making an effort with spelling is good manners.

[ April 07, 2002, 01:32 AM: Message edited by: JonS ]

[Andreas]

L4Pilot, thanks for the info, I stand corrected.

[SpazManOught]

WRT metorites, you are talking about several orders of magnitude (at least!) more energy in a meteorite event as compared to an artillery or mortar round. Artillery doesn't 'liquify' the ground.

This was not the point I was trying to make, if the impact crater is destroyed by an explosion crater then you cannot tell what the general trajectory was. If the explosion from a HE round is not strong enough to destroy it's impact crater then why bother with the HE why not just fire a heavier round and make a larger impact crater. Maybe they can work this stuff out from the impact of duds, but you'd have to be a real hero to go out measuring impact craters in the middle of an arty barrage.

Cant get anything out of the search engine sorry.

[Brian]

Originally posted by SpazManOught:

WRT metorites, you are talking about several orders of magnitude (at least!) more energy in a meteorite event as compared to an artillery or mortar round. Artillery doesn't 'liquify' the ground.

Wrong. The rim of the crater will be slightly lower on the side towards the gun, rather than on the one away. Howitzers and mortars are slightly harder because their rounds tend to fall more vertically. The explosion crater, because of the nature of explosions from shells with contact fuses will still reflect this general rule because the majority of the last will be directed not vertically upwards but in the reverse direction away from the ground, back along the trajectory of the round.

You don't have to go out into the middle of an artillery barrage - you go out afterwards. Crater analysis is a fairly imprecise methodology for artillery location. However, it can give you the general direction, to within a few hundred mils of where the enemy batteries are, particularly at longer ranges because the trajectory tends to be flatter.

Your analogy falls down IMO becuase most meteorites impact at near vertical angles. Look at the impact craters from, I believe its Patagonia, where a large meteorite bounced across the surface of the ground at a shallow angle. These bounce craters are elongated, just as most artillery craters are.

[Monty's Double]

And before anyone else gets in, these days they do it with radar, and it's very, very accurate indeed. Modern mobile artillery like MLRS and that american 155mm thingy (M109? Paladin?) is designed to grab a fire mission and be on its way in a matter of minutes, before unpleasantness arrives in return.

[JasonC]

The Germans were very good at using signals intelligence for this job. They would have a number of radio intercept stations, pick up radio traffic from fire direction centers or HQs, and triangulate the position (by turning antennas and such-like, seeing when they got and when they lost signal). Then their counterbattery would target the grid square the radio traffic originated from.

The Allies weren't so sophisticated, and mostly used sound and flash ranging (which the Germans also used, to be sure), a basically WW I technique. But they also had air superiority, allowing air observation. That often made the German guns stop firing, rather than finding them and plastering them, but either way the guns could be neutralized.

As for the idea that div arty didn't do counterbattery, that is far from true. Yes, there were long range guns especially well adapted to in at corps level and higher - German 170mm, US 155mm guns (rather than howitzers), or 4.5 inch guns (Brit or US). They had reach to get back well behind the enemy front over a wide area. German mobile divisions also usually had one battery of 100mm guns (not howitzers) specially meant for long range counterbattery (or indirection, harassment, etc) fire.

But everything could be used for it and often was, if the enemy guns were close enough. Although it was probably more common with the heavier 150mm-155mm stuff, as more likely to hurt an area target. Whether enemy guns were close enough was mostly a function of deployment of the batteries themselves - how close they were to the line.

Attackers put their guns well forward, only about 1/3rd of their maximum range behind their front line and sometimes less than that. Meaning they had 2/3rds or more of their reach into the enemy rear area. By the same token, they were easier for enemy counterbattery to reach.

Defenders were often farther back to avoid counterbattery. But too far back and the portion of the front line they can reach for defensive fires gets pretty narrow. (At maximum range it would be only one point). So typically they were no more than 2/3rds of their range envelope behind the line.

So any gun with appreciably better range than any enemy type could wind up with counterbattery chances. If both sides were deployed back - on a quiet sector for instance, neither attacking - then perhaps CB work would be restricted to the specially long-ranged guns (4.5 inch, 155mm gun rather than howitzer, 100mm and 170mm gun). Otherwise plenty of "pairings" could occur. Sometimes batteries moved forward explicitly to shoot CB missions too, sticking around only if they succeeding in outshooting the batteries opposite, bugging out otherwise.

[SpazManOught]

Posted by Brian.

Wrong. The rim of the crater will be slightly lower on the side towards the gun, rather than on the one away. Howitzers and mortars are slightly harder because their rounds tend to fall more vertically. The explosion crater, because of the nature of explosions from shells with contact fuses will still reflect this general rule because the majority of the last will be directed not vertically upwards but in the reverse direction away from the ground, back along the trajectory of the round.

Thanks for that I didn't stop to think about the actual blast pattern for the HE itself I just assumed it would be equal in all directions. The skipping impacts do produce elliptical craters but for slightly different reasons and no most meteorites do not impact vertically that would just be too odd as the Earth is not the centre of the Universe. If you actually try the experiment at one of the links you will see that just throwing pebbles into sand at an angle will leave circular impacts only very shallow impacts will leave non-circular impacts and this is due to the impacted object sliding along the ground after impact. Having a non-spherical explosion will change this completely and this is the only area in which my analogy falls down.

[Brian]

Originally posted by SpazManOught:

Posted by Brian.

Wrong. The rim of the crater will be slightly lower on the side towards the gun, rather than on the one away. Howitzers and mortars are slightly harder because their rounds tend to fall more vertically. The explosion crater, because of the nature of explosions from shells with contact fuses will still reflect this general rule because the majority of the last will be directed not vertically upwards but in the reverse direction away from the ground, back along the trajectory of the round.

No, it tends to be, if anything, going by the diagrams I've seen/accounts I've read, more of an ovoid, with most of the blast directed away from the ground, back along the trajectory.

But it is the centre of a deep gravity well. Most objects hitting the earth will traverse a spiral which gets steeper the closer to the earth it becomes. Therefore, the objects are much more likely to hit near or close to vertical, than they are to make a glancing hit, unless they have sufficient velocity and are basically aimed at the same piece of space that the earth occupies at that point of time as the collision occurs.

But thats merely an impact crater, it is not an explosion crater as well.

Harry Blackburn in one of his books, Guns of Normandy, I think, speaks of how his battery was shelled and there would be occassional blinds. To test how far one had penetrated they placed a sighting rod down the hole. That rod would have been pointing exactly back along that shell's trajectory. Crater analysis does the same thing but with the crater of an exploded round, utilising the rule of thumb I described above.

[ April 08, 2002, 02:46 AM: Message edited by: Brian ]