"WW2 Artillery burst radius/lethality" Topic

Hi All

Is there anything published about the statistical effect of WW2 artillery? Do you have links?

Something like the HE entry at the bottom here would be good

link

(NOTE – Please do NOT get side tracked into the accuracy figures on this page, its a demo of what I'm after! Some idea of lethality)

As my game is 1:200 ground scale you don't aim at individual units, an area gets hit.

As tubes would fire a number of rounds – a 25 pdr 1 every 10-15 seconds – how would I model that?

If you can find terminal ballistics volume II pdf this would show the blast zone. The links have disappeared.

All you ever wanted to know about artillery in WW2, including fire effects for various weights of fire vs different types of targets etc.

nigelef.tripod.com

Note that the definitions of 'suppressed' and 'neutralised' changed after the war, which may cause some confusion when looking at NATO/Warpac docs covering the same stuff after the war.

Last Huzzar, If you look at Nato artillery planning its proably very similar to WW2. It would ap[pear theat basicaly you work out the area of the target to be impacted and the level of damage required and its state. A Table give an effective area per shell divide into the area you want too hit an you get the number of shells. Rate of fire may well be secondry but does do mare damake as the fisrt shells hit if the troops are not in full protection.

It should be noted for WW2 guns. thay are set out basicaly in the width of rthe pattern they are to produce so all the guns can be laid simply on thre same direction, elevation and charge. Any significant angle change or more complex calculations for each gun would proably take longer than the actaul barrage.

One constant in all of this is the strange belief that woods are worse. If you look at the carefully designed tables dence woodlands need more shells to get the effect. It may be that woods have a higher density of splinters that go only a short distance (wood splinters won't go far due to low density so if you get hit its worse but each shell has a lower effective area.

link here are the 3 volumes of the Terminal ballistics data

One constant in all of this is the strange belief that woods are worse. If you look at the carefully designed tables dence woodlands need more shells to get the effect. It may be that woods have a higher density of splinters that go only a short distance (wood splinters won't go far due to low density so if you get hit its worse but each shell has a lower effective area.

If the defenders were in underground bunkers the rounds would most likely have a delay fuse to penetrate into the ground before exploding. Trees would help defeat the delay timing. However, fuses set for superquick hitting trees would give better than expected air burst results against defenders without overhead protection and worse results with overhead protection.

The Terminal Ballistics data gives examples of ground and air burst burst diagrams.

Wolfhag

There are some good contemporary videos on YouTube about about mortar effectiveness vs. troops in different postures. Advancing troops in the open are terribly vulnerable to the first bombs, but then they drop prone and lethality drops like a rock (or like throwing rocks at them).

Similar effect for artillery. After the first few rounds, almost all troops will hit the ground, and then they're suppressed until the fire lifts. So, continued suppression is essentially automatic.

link US 155
link British Artillery