Mortars and trees - precise placement required

[phil stanbridge]

I took some friendly fire casualties in a battle when I setup one of my mortar teams in some woods - although I thought I could see daylight between them, LOS and the trees I lost all but one man to an exploding shell! So can mortars be setup within trees/woodland or are they supposed to be out in the open? Obviously if this is the case, and you can setup hidden amongst the trees, this takes some pretty accurate placement. Could this be a little bug we are seeing here.

[panzermartin]

I've seen this with indirect use of Inf Guns. They seem to be unaware of the obstacles infront of them, or I could be wrong. I had a 150mm gun wasting 6-7 rounds on trees (killed some nearby friendly inf) before finding a gap between the branches and hitting the original target.

[Boche]

Well if you throw an impact detonated projectile upwards into a bunch of trees, preety much 1 branch is going to make it blow

[Blackcat]

I took some friendly fire casualties in a battle when I setup one of my mortar teams in some woods - although I thought I could see daylight between them, LOS and the trees I lost all but one man to an exploding shell! So can mortars be setup within trees/woodland or are they supposed to be out in the open? Obviously if this is the case, and you can setup hidden amongst the trees, this takes some pretty accurate placement. Could this be a little bug we are seeing here.

This is the dark side of every projectile is tracked and hits what ever is in its path. Not a bug, I think; just the game behaving as it should.

For me the lesson to be drawn from your post is that I not put mortars in woods, and can I say thank you for teaching me that valuable lesson.

[gunnergoz]

Don't set up mortars directly behind tall buildings, either, especially if your target is some distance away, since the projectile just might impact the upper floors or roof on the way.

[akd]

Don't set up mortars directly behind tall buildings, either, especially if your target is some distance away, since the projectile just might impact the upper floors or roof on the way.

They won't let you set a target in this circumstance. The targeting pointer will say "no line of fire" if any solid object (terrain, building, wall) blocks the trajectory from the tube to the target. (Trees/foliage do not count.)

[GreenAsJade]

Sounds like trees/foliage should count

[akd]

Sounds like trees/foliage should count

Then you wouldn't be able to target something beneath trees/foliage on the other end. Better to use simple logic and not put artillery underneath trees.

[WillLight]

Even if the round didn't detonate on the light contact with branches, twigs and leaves it would surely have its trajectory affected. Maybe some actual ex or current infantry could chime in, would you in RL fire a mortar under a tree?

[phil stanbridge]

Don't get me wrong - when I said I setup in 'wooded' terrain I didn't mean completely covered as that would be pretty daft

I had LOS to the target remember - how does wind effect trajectory of the shells etc? Because the branches were swaying and possibly interfering with the path of the LOS. Although the mortars are deadly accurate most of the time due to the relatively small maps they are quite hard to locate safely. At the mo in one scenario I have two mortar teams setup behind a two level building - and a stone wall. They have little or no LOS to the target area of course, but I was intending on using a platoon commander to direct fire. But after reading some of these posts I'm thinking they are best positioned in completely open ground.

[Redwolf]

Didn't the 60mm mortar have a fuse that would activate some distance away from the barrel?

[StrykerPSG]

You can only use indirect means in a covered area if they have an area above that is mostly free of obstructions. This is part of their 5 safety checks and is pretty common amongst all mortars. This safety check was mask and overhead clearence. In laymans terms, you could set up in a wooded area or behind a building, but gunner would elevate cannon to highest & lowest elevations to establish the elevations that would safely clear the obstacles, by looking along the axis of the cannon for clearence. Those elevations are reported to the Fire Direction Center, as well as manually record on the gun itself in the form of a safety T. The general rule of thumb was we could/would shoot through branches but they had to be half the diameter of the round and those first rounds breaking brush were guaranteed to miss the original burst point by quite a bit.

Back in the 90's, when nets were still popular, had many an excited gun crew forget to pull their nets down and shoot their first rounds through the net. The rounds wouldn't detonate but did punch through, generally quite a ways off from the original calculated burst point.

Also, was mentioned about setting up behind buildings, which is a great barrier for counter battery fire, but again, mask and overhead must be utilized. So, it seems the game replicates this quite well, it's just a matter of not setting up so close to the obstacle as to pose a greater hazard to the gun crew and surrounding Soldiers.

Matt