"Is it Just Me?" Topic

Interesting…

link

Amicalement
Armand

The article concerns wargaming rules and having artillery fire overhead of intervening friendly troops. The author "would have conceded that howitzers and mortars would be able to fire overhead from the same elevation as friendly troops".

I think that although artillery were often 'capable' of firing over their heads it was a dangerous proposition because of smoke obscuring visability hence the need for the artillery to be on a higher elevation.

You can imagine a mortar bomb sailing over the heads of intervening troops. But their range was very short.

Guns and howitzers had shallow trajectories – so would just about clear forward troops.

Also all sorts of burning dunnage and packing would come out after the shot – a wooden sabot would not be nice in the back of the head.

It's a big leap from questions about elavation and overhead fire to suppose indirect fire existed.

It might have been technically possible for "howitzers and mortars…to fire overhead from the same elevation as friendly troops", but the guns need a line of sight to the target that intervening troops are going to block. Between that, smoke and the distance the target could move in the time between reloads, this must have been vanishingly rare.

Even firing at buildings, where those are less of a factor, would be risky, for the reasons Stoppage gives.

It sounds like the kind of out-of-period thing someone today thinks ought to have been possible, and therefore builds into the rules so that it is.

I blame Sharpe for this, doing his anachronistic long-range patrols hundreds of miles behind French lines because someone's read Bravo Two Zero and not realised it was fiction.

All period artillery pieces, long guns and howitzers, were direct fire weapons. You had to see the target to hit it.

see link

Modern howitzer fire more like napoleonic mortars, at high angles of elevation. Napoleonic howiters worked on a different set of principles of physics and the laws of gravitation and air resistance. Please remember that ISAAC NEWTON was Noble Prize worthy for his understanding of the laws of gravation- something that 95%+ of modern people do NOT really understand the principles of. .. .. .. A napoleonic howitzer DOES NOT stick the barrel muzzle high in the air and do "rainbow plunging fire". It fires a LARGE, wide shell at a slight muzzle elevation at a SLOW VELOCITY. The key physics is that how far the shell sinks downwards depend upon how long it has been acted on by gravity. It takes a long time to go 300 yards because it starts slow AND has a big wind resistance that takes kinetic energy out of the projectile. (so,MASSxVELOCITYxVELOCITY/2 is lowered, which means the shell slows down quickly and takes even longer to get out to range). … The way to look at it,is to realize that shell SINKS quickly (by the square of the time it has been flying). so it can drop down on things & get behind buildings, swalls , hills and trees. … Besides all that, you can cram a lot of cannister into that big bore and it is great to help for close in defense of the battery.

Do you ever come up for air? I think you post 24 hours a day – GROAN

A much under-appreciated hazard of overhead fire is the wooden sabots used in quite a few of the period guns flew a far shorter distance than the shell or ball being fired.

Far shorter as in falling on the heads of intervening friendly troops.

Thanks!.

Amicalement
Armand

If I recall correctly even as late as the ACW infantry officers were recorded as threatening their own artillery with retaliation if they attempted overhead fire!

As a general rule, the flatter the trajectory, the higher the probable error in range tends to be (that's why the "danger close" footprint is so much larger for naval gunfire). And that's for modern artillery- can you imagine how bad the problem would be with smoothbore weapons, substantial windage, and sloppy measuring of black powder charges of wildly varying chemical composition? Danger area E for a modern 105mm is, IIRC, about half a kilometer in front of the tube- and that's for indirect fire.