Mortars!

[yurch]

Because somebody asked me to. It's a good time to look at mortars, especially since they aren't randomly annihilating targets anymore.

I'll start with a comparison of the light, medium, and heavy mortar:

All three are nearly identical with the exception of the HEBlastDiameter, and the base penetration. Unfortunately, I don't know how this blastdiameter works, but the heavy mortar obviously has the better of the three. The base penetrations are 175/225/275 for light/medium/heavy. A Thor has a top chassis armor of 150 and 75 for it's turret, so all three can be effective with a direct hit to the top. The light mortar may have difficulty with or an inability to penetrate some of the more protected turrets, however. Internal damage dealt by a mortar on a penetrating direct hit is catastrophic, with a kill factor of 500.

All three mortars are fired by the MC-class (with the exception of the hurricane) vehicles with the same accuracy and low/high impulse numbers of 400/700. The Hurricane fires the heaviest mortar type at an initial speed of 900, making it the furthest ranged mortar in the game.

Oddly enough, the StructuralDamageAmount for the heavy mortar is set to zero in the current version. Depending on what damage the HEBlast parameter deals to structures, the medium mortar could be the most effective weapon against ion and missile towers.

The medium mortar carrier (SP mortar, Apollo chassis) has a reduced front armor compared to other Apollo variants. The paladin is actually better armored in this aspect. The launching turrets are respectably armored, with 300 front, 200 side and 200 top. The Thor variant for some reason has a 75 top. Hurricane has a 200 front but 300 top. Interestingly enough, ATGM has a 250 penetration, so top lock might be a bad idea versus the hurricane as most, but not all, of those shots will hit that part of the turret.

Mortars can be fired with reasonable success using three methods:

Visual fire. Leave your rangefinder on auto, and aim directly at targets or spaces of ground. You can lead as necessary using manual range, but only in sideways directions with the indirect mortars (I will explain this later). This is very good against stationary targets like deployables and Thors, and requires the least strain on the user. The paladin can be used in a drive-by manner using this to clear a turret farm.

Ctrl-m fire. Used to fire on marked targets by teammate waypoints or known positions of turrets. This or the above can be fired at dropships to greet dropping enemies with a welcoming gift. This is never very accurate, and the chance of scoring direct hits is low. Not recommended with the light mortar. There is a bug using this or any other method to fire at ranges outside the capability of the system - it will fire a low impulse mortar instead of the high one and will obviously never hit the intended target.

Counter battery fire. Diamonds will pop up at the position of enemy (and friendly!!!) firings. If you can read the number fast enough, you can manually range a round using [ and ] keys and fire it in that direction. You will not be able to aim in ranges finer than 100 meters. This is the most difficult method of targeting, especially due to the very small time window you get for the counter battery info. This is the stealthiest method of attacking without friendly targeting info, and can be used to fire from areas where the enemy cannot detect you electronically or even visually. You can adjust the shot with this ranging method from side to side, but putting the crosshair above or below the target has little or no bearing on where the mortar will hit. You will need to manually adjust the depth to lead a target in a forward or backwards manner, which is probably the hardest way to fire in the game.

End objective analysis.

I've been using mortars on a stint recently, and I think as a whole they are a bit underpowered. Not in terms of shell strength, but in terms of chassis versatility and targeting capability. Most of the gametypes involve constantly moving targets and point defenses. With the exception of the hurricane, they are completely unable to defend themselves in a timely manner when spotted at any range, and I rarely see them deployed as support with or behind escorts. Most players prefer to keep them in a totally indirect mode. The craft have a fantastic rate of fire for their firepower, but have a difficulty with anything non-stationary, even with full electronic and visual confirmation.

Defense:

I would suggest giving all of the mortar carriers a coaxial. Not only does it give the unit some close-range firing capability without annihilating itself and friendlies, but it alleviates the bizarre situations where you have two mortar carriers sharing a galaxy without a single ground weapon between the three of them.

The reduced frontal armor on the Apollo and the Thor mortar turret top seem largely unnecessary.

Offense:

I think the light and medium mortars in particular are too high impulse for their own good. 120mm HEAT has a fair penetration at 8km, but there isn’t a chance in hell it’s actually going to hit. The same is true for these mortars at long range, and there’s little reason to be firing them that far with their lower payload. A lower in-flight time allows for less error in lead, a shorter time till target disruption, and a slightly less chance of being intercepted by point defense, all while retaining the unique top-attack capability of attacking targets. Many of Dropteam’s battles are highly mobile affairs occurring at 3500 meters or less, and a short range mortar could be an asset here. I think the light and medium mortars could and should be adapted for such. The light Paladin might be an excellent infantry support platform if given the additional ability to transport them and to receive targets from the infantry in turn.

An estimated time-to-hit readout near the crosshair would be very useful for determining lead, and is significantly easier than more involved interface adjustments. It is too hard to remember the performances of rounds on various planets.

I’m not going to suggest lead calculators or other such target assistance to in order to keep consistency with other Dropteam vehicles.

Keeping the counter battery information around a bit longer would also be useful. “Painted” targets (either waypoints or a new method of communication available to other units) could show up simply as additional counter battery information.

A modifier key to hold (like shift) while using the [ and ] keys for finer and coarser control would be appreciated.

Edit, now have more information, will soon have a comparison of the destructive capabilities of the three mortars below.

[ July 31, 2006, 12:45 PM: Message edited by: yurch ]

[yllamana]

I agree with pretty much everything here. One thing I think the game needs is for the command & control interface to extend into the 3d view better, allowing selection of units and especially the accurate placing of waypoints. It's a pain trying to drop waypoints on jammed targets. I know where I am and my rangefinder knows how far away what I'm looking at is - I should be able to place waypoints there.

My biggest issue with counterbattery fire is having to tab through ~50 presses of the key to get it into the appropriate range sometimes. I've managed to use it to great effect with the Apollo MC on that green map with the hill in the middle.

I also think the Apollo and especially the Paladin could really use more ammo. I don't think we'd be seeing everyone deploying in the Paladin MC if it had as much as double the ammo capacity. Even if you're careful to expend both types of rounds, the Paladin takes very little time to run out of ammo and it seems wasteful to call a Galaxy down to resupply the little thing.

Interesting thought: pretty much all the units are dangerous to all the other units, with the notable exception of... the mortar carriers. In particular, Thors seem pretty much invincible unless they're immobile. Even then I haven't had success killing them with direct heavy mortar fire aimed at the hull - they just end up sitting in a crater even when it appeared to hit. With the Paladin MC I've managed to set Thor turrets on fire, but again, they need to not move at all, and you need to have the elevation to aim directly at the top of the turret.

Another thing that could help is better indications that a mortar round or shrapnel has penetrated a target. As it is, you usually have no idea if you did anything unless whatever you hit catches fire or explodes.

Actually, maybe that'd be a good thing for the game in general. What if all damage was more obvious somehow? Like if you damaged the engine it might make a different noise and maybe you can see oxygen leaking from the vehicle (unless it expires, in which case you might see some smoke come out and then nothing). If you hit the fuel cell, maybe you can see mysterious sparks appearing around it, or some other visual distortion. You know, the usual thing you see around an imminent antimatter containment breach.

Just some thoughts.

[Alexander SquidLord Williams]

Oh, and something simple for the mortar commander:

The mortar unit and the driver of any Mercuries on the field should see a red max range circle on the tactical map to mark what not to fire beyond. That's a computer's job on planets with varying gravities and atmospheric densities.

[yurch]

Clay has posted some information based on how these mortars work, and with some extensive testing I can now undergo a further comparison between the three mortar types.

Light, medium and heavy mortars all have the same shrapnel penetration, of exactly 100. This number is important, because this is the armor value of a good percentage of the facings on units in the game.

I'm going to arbitrarily divide armor into three catagories for ease of comparison: Class 3 armor is any armor of rating 101 or higher, Class 2 armor is armor rated at or very slightly below 100, and Class 1 armor is rated well below 100.

Class 3 armor is immune to shrapnel penetration. The only way to defeat this armor with the mortars is to hit it directly, at which point the mortar acts like a HEAT round with the base penetrations discussed in the first post.

Class 2 armor is penetratable only with close proximity to the explosion, before the shrapnel penetration begins to fall off. This falloff is largely independant of mortar type and is rather dictated by the map atmosphere. Since the point where shrapnel can no longer penetrate can likely come before the shrapnel cutoff of the mortar (we're talking about an armor difference of 1 here), all three mortar types are just as likely to penetrate this class of armor with a nearby explosion. This is a bit of a surprise. On thinner atmosphere maps the light or medium may have too small of a cutoff range to match thier siblings.

Class 1 armor will most likely be penetrated at any range still inside the explosion of the mortar. Therefore, the larger mortars will give the better coverage in this case.

As always, ion hits can degrade the class of an armor facing.

A few things to note:

Class 1 armor is located on the back of nearly every other combat unit besides the thor. The hurricane and shrike chassis are both entirely class 1 with the exception of the hurricane front, which is 2. Dropships, deployables and infantry are class 1. The largest target area therefore is the unobstructed space behind an enemy combat chassis. Mortar carriers should be making an attempt to land shots here instead of going for direct hits. This target space is much smaller for smaller mortar types (it doubles with every increase in size), and is in fact quite small for the light mortar.

Class 2 armor is located on the sides and top/bottom of most combat units, and on the front of some of the lighter ones like the command track or tempest. It is possible to penetrate these areas but only at closer ranges.

Paladin and Apollo front are class 3. Shots exploding in front of either of these units will not damage the chassis.

The Thor is covered in class 3 armor, including the rear. The chassis is virtually immune to everything but a direct hit. That is, unless you somehow manage to lodge a shell underneath it, in which case it is class 2. The (standard)turret rear, which was increased in the latest patch is also class 2. It is not advisable to attack the Thor with any of the mortars.

This advice is for penetration only, and not for maximizing damage. I believe this should be the primary concern for mortar carriers - you can go for the direct hit after the engine is disabled.

I highly recommend for ion users to attack class 2 targets in an effort to degrade them to class 1, which won't take much effort even with an infantry ion. Hurricanes should bring a Tempest escort.

That's it for now. I haven't got a chance to try much of this out in actual combat yet.

[yllamana]

Originally posted by ClaytoniousRex

Upon impact, whether they penetrate or not, HE projectiles explode. Extra damage is now dealt to everything within the explosion's radius, including the object which was directly struck (if any).

Combined with the part about how the shrapnel range is at most 13.3 times the blast diameter, this implies that the blast itself is somehow damaging. What damage does the blast itself do?

[ClaytoniousRex]

We don't model any damage from the concussion/compression of the blast itself. When I said "extra damage" I meant above what may have already been dealt by the direct hit of the projectile on the target.

[yllamana]

Ah, thank-you for the clarification.

I tried using an Apollo MC earlier, but had problems because of how Thor-happy the bots are. I managed to kill a Shrike or something, but then I swapped over to Apollo KC-H to kill the Thors.

Thors kinda need to be very resistant to mortars if they want to be useful (otherwise we'd just shell them to bits) but it's something to think about that the mortar carriers are the only vehicles that can't effectively engage Thor at some range. All the others can. Just something to think about.

[yurch]

The mortar carriers can "engage" Thor and other units just fine.

It's just the margin of error on a manually-aimed direct hit with shell flight times of 11 seconds and onwards is extreme. Even a hit in the critical areas outlined above is difficult. A Paladin can run you down before your second shot hits, in which case you may as well drop it on yourself...

Players have little incentive to sit still in this game and our targeting is fairly primative. Combine these aspects with point defense and you have a unit type with a real losing combo and very little in the way of options. The other configurations of the same chassis types pretty much do everything better from anti infantry to hardened targets.

If it weren't for the everpresent galaxy, players would be dropping infantry right on top of most of the mortars.

I consider the Thor coaxial on the 120mm variant to be a great asset, and I think this would carry over for to the mortar units as well. If given a little more in the way of a independance capability perhaps they could be used with the frontline attack rather than remaining out of sight behind it. Otherwise, It's awfully hard to hit targets and observe fire with just the primitive spotting methods we have availible.

It's going to take more than just a coaxial (ions?) to make them effective units, though.

[yurch]

Been counting my flight times and adjusting aim to direct fire in the rear armors. Doing reasonably well with the apollo mortar once the thors are gone.

[yllamana]

I've always found them reasonably dangerous against AFVs they could hurt (well, except the Paladin MC-L, which I don't think I've ever had much luck with even using direct fire). The difficulty I have is that they have no hope of hurting Thor at all past blind luck, and of course that the ion towers seem to make them pretty much useless.

I tend to deploy them around friendly AFVs, so people dropping on me and whatever else isn't a huge problem. It's just I can never, ever kill Thor.

Incidentally, I have had what were, as best I could tell, direct chassis hits with the heavy mortar on Thor (who was completely still, firing enthusiastically at me from 6km away) to no apparent effect - he would disappear into the dust-covered crater, then crawl out of it and start shooting at me again (so no apparent driver damage either). This repeated a number of times.

Note that my post said "effectively engage". I don't think any of the mortars can effectively engage Thor - none of them except the Thor MC can even reasonably hope to survive being in a Thor's line of sight, and any shot that doesn't directly hit the turret top seems completely ineffective against them (short of making them crawl out of a crater, which has some humour value at least).

[civdiv]

I don't have the game put I thought these might be of interest to you guys. This might be something they could think about incorporating;

SADARM;

http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/sadarm.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SADARM

or;

http://www.global-defence.com/2000/pages/mortar.html

I think there was a project for an optically guided mortar round. The round had a video camera in the nose and the operator used a joystick and a video screen to guide it to its target. I think that would be neat in a computer game.

But they would have to keep the number of rounds on board to a minimum as these could be too effective. On the flip-side, I can't see 'dumb' munitions still being used this far in the future. On the flip-flip-side, you can't jam a 'dumb' weapon.