Project Artillery

[ArmySGT.]

Avalanche control with 105mm

[Project_Sardonicus]

The Projects military forces are quite modest. Most of its equipment are only slightly heavier than a well equipped SWAT team would be packing. Even MARS1 and SCIENCE1 vehicles are little more than mobile bases packing some good firepower into mobile packages.

The heaviest piece of artillery the project seems to have is am 81mm mortar with a range of 3 miles.

Meaning that if a local warlord or crazed politician helped themselves to the local National Guard Armoury and they had a few 105mm light guns or invaders from Cuba or Mexico crossed the border the project is finished. Even old versions of these sorts of weapons having treble the range at least and able to pound any Morrow encampment into dust.

The project can't just buy this equipment, where would you even store a dozen heavy guns, the vehicles to move them and tonnes of ammunition

Not to mention the Project isn't a military endeavour. Investing in the capacity to pound distant targets feels like giving up before you started.

As such the project funded as was their usual want in sophisticated solutions.
If they couldn't get range and weight of power, they would go for speed and accuracy.

They invested heavily in the companies that produced the MERLIN and STRIX guided missile rounds. As well as a few 120mm mortars to fire the strix and trained a small elite core of MARS and RECON artillery operators. Also investing in laser range finders and light weight ballistic computers to make the most of this capacity. These guided rounds were also equipped with rocket based range extenders and given the option of laser designation as opposed to thermal seeker heads.

The idea being a project spots a potential target, say the purported warlord and his artillery park. They park a spotter with a laser designator on a nearby hill. Then drive up a couple of Hummers a few miles away get half a dozen rounds in the air and get away as fast as possible, while the observer guides them in. If possible only using expensive guided rounds for the first couple and following up with dumb shots.

It was an expensive, awkward compromise and only ever accounted for 10% of mortar shells. A similar tactic was tried with loading 120 mm mortars and counter battery radars onto 2.5-tonne trucks.

[ArmySGT.]

Certainly a solution as is the Israeli 8 pack of surface to surface missiles.

How do you procure these What is it going to cost How do you find trained operators How do you train new operators

105mm is ridiculously common and cheap to manufacture. The Project can have a range in a western State with a manufacturing license for international sales.

There is a company ATK, right here in Colorado.

http://www.orbitalatk.com/defense-systems/armament-systems/

[cosmicfish]

I think I am missing something here - how do you guys see the Project using or needing artillery Arty is normally something that is deployed as part of a substantial combined arms force, it requires it's own set of perishable skills as well as a substantial investment in equipment (plus supplies, spares, and storage space!), and requires a large target area and/or forward observers. None of this sounds like the Project to me.

If artillery pieces are wide spread in TMP, then it means a lot of teams having to learn them and maintain them and practice with them and drag them around with them. And that seems like a lot of time and money and space that could be best used for other things in an organization that is supposed to be more about rebuilding than waging war.

If artillery pieces are rare, then they are almost never going to be where they are needed when they are needed* and they are almost never going to be in the kinds of concentrations that make artillery really useful on the battlefield. By the time you move artillery into place, you have other options to remove the enemy threat.

So where is the balance point where artillery is worth having

*: This is also my argument against other rare beasts like the MARS-1 vehicles, unicorns that excite players but don't seem to serve a real purpose. The Project has few men and few aircraft a lot of territory, assets outside a hundred mile radius of a given problem are likely out of play.

[cosmicfish]

Meaning that if a local warlord or crazed politician helped themselves to the local National Guard Armoury and they had a few 105mm light guns or invaders from Cuba or Mexico crossed the border the project is finished. Even old versions of these sorts of weapons having treble the range at least and able to pound any Morrow encampment into dust.

I disagree. Artillery are indirect fire weapons, they require training and infrastructure to use, they require forward observers, and they are not tremendously mobile (and when they are in motion they are generally inoperable!). Even if a team walks into a targeted area with an observation post they are unlikely to be directly taken out if they are in their vehicles, and taking out the vehicles is likely to require a direct hit (unless they are in something like an XR311). Given the mobility of a typical team, getting killed by artillery is generally going to require bad luck, bad planning, or the kind of enemy force that is gross overkill for a game.

[ArmySGT.]

http://www.carlisle.army.mil/ahec/trail/Vietnam/

[.45cultist]

M102 Howitzer, Towed, 105mm.

And was a part of some Green Beret camp equipment in Vietnam. I would like a more varied mortar section, and stuff like this for special groups. The M102 would make quite a dragon for the team to slay. An M226 60MM mortar has a place in light team's special item list.

[Project_Sardonicus]

I think I am missing something here - how do you guys see the Project using or needing artillery Arty is normally something that is deployed as part of a substantial combined arms force, it requires it's own set of perishable skills as well as a substantial investment in equipment (plus supplies, spares, and storage space!), and requires a large target area and/or forward observers. None of this sounds like the Project to me.

If artillery pieces are wide spread in TMP, then it means a lot of teams having to learn them and maintain them and practice with them and drag them around with them. And that seems like a lot of time and money and space that could be best used for other things in an organization that is supposed to be more about rebuilding than waging war.

If artillery pieces are rare, then they are almost never going to be where they are needed when they are needed* and they are almost never going to be in the kinds of concentrations that make artillery really useful on the battlefield. By the time you move artillery into place, you have other options to remove the enemy threat.

So where is the balance point where artillery is worth having

*: This is also my argument against other rare beasts like the MARS-1 vehicles, unicorns that excite players but don't seem to serve a real purpose. The Project has few men and few aircraft a lot of territory, assets outside a hundred mile radius of a given problem are likely out of play.

Artillery has one huge advantage it allows you to hit your opponent from a convenient range. Anything else means your valuabl, irreplacable having to get within getting clobbered range of the enemy.

Probably the aim of most MORROW engagements would be distance and ambush. No safer way of doing that than from miles away with a couple of hills in the way.

The problem would be doing this with equipment light enough to get dragged around by a big jeep.

[Project_Sardonicus]

I always think the Project would probably copy a lot of SADF equipment from the 70s and 80s, when not going hitech. Cheap easily, produced, durable and able to get dragged for 100s of kilometers by truck around rough ground.

Probably the Valkiri would be a great sucker punch weapon. Find a big encampment of bandits, then with one blow send them scuttling away. A blow that could be loaded on the back of a very ordinary medium truck.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valkiri

[mmartin798]

This is not a bad idea, though logistical issues with new weapon systems has often been mentioned in threads to argue against them. The Hydra 70 is already in the Morrow arsenal. Mounting 4 M200A1 pods on a trailer or truck bed would give you 36 2.75" rockets. Though to be effective, you would need to have APKWS added to the inventory. Otherwise with the small warhead and the large dispersal pattern of surface to surface fire of Hydra 70 that are unguided makes them much less effective.

[cosmicfish]

The Project has limited personnel, limited resources, and limited storage/transport capability. Artillery requires abundant personnel, abundant resources, and abundant storage/transport capability. The trend in Project weapons should be towards precision as much as possible, and away from "area suppression". MLRS is a particularly bad idea, a weapon that requires a dedicated vehicle and fires an entire truckload of ammunition at once.

If the Project needs to fight a large army, it needs to do so by identifying and eliminating key elements with precision munitions, not blanketing a region with mostly-wasted dumb munitions.

[mmartin798]

Agreed, which is why APKWS would be needed to put the Hydra 70 in a comparable role. They cannot be fired en mass like the Valkiri, but with a forward observer doing laser painting, the APKWS would not need to saturate the area, seeing as it is able to place the impact within a couple meters.

[Project_Sardonicus]

It seems the obvious choice, but I doubt the Project would buy it off the shelf.

Better to buy a bunch of kits for modifying preexisting 2.75 rockets, TOW missiles and mortar rounds.

Maybe accompanied by some sort of early drone with a laser designator.

The idea being that where as buying giant stock piles of ancient warheads for destruction makes sense. Indeed they might even get paid to dispose of it, then update at it at their own convenience. Works out better than someone in the FBI going, "so where are all these laser guided bombs going"

I think a fairly good idea for Morrow supplies is to be careful with anything that might make the Secret Service say,

"You could assasinate the President with this!"

[Project_Sardonicus]

nb The Israelis in the 1980s added laser homing kits to their TOW missiles and bigger engines then called them LAHATS. The SADF bought them, copied the design etc and called them Ingwes and used them to destroy many SWAPO/Cuban tanks. So this hobby craft approach to improving on primitive weapons isn't so unusual.

[cosmicfish]

"You could assasinate the President with this!"

That describes the entire Morrow arsenal. Seriously, every Team deploys with a host of military weapons not legally available to common citizens. While it is true that some are more tightly controlled than others, Morrow resources should mean that if the government gets suspicious they are more likely to think "illegal arms sales" or such than "assassinate the President".