nigelfe

Lessons from Northern Ireland 1. There are no quick fixes. 2. There are no easy fixes. 3. You need the political will for a sustained effort. 4. You need very well trained and disciplined soldiers. 5. You need to be tactically creative within stringent constraints. 6. You need the equivalent of the SRR for information gathering.

The Marines, ie the Royal Marines, just had their 351st anniversary.

The various editions of "The Infantry Platoon in Battle", part of the Infantry Training series. Simples.

The Russians used horsed cavalry in WW2, particularly in the Pripet marshes region. Then of course one of the three Fronts that Russia moved east in 1945 (precisely meeting their commitment at Yalta) contained the Russian-Mongolian Cavalry Mechanised Army (the southernmost army that attacked eastwards). This mixed horse and tanks. Clearly after 4 years of continuous practice on Germans the Russians realised that horses had a role against the Japanese. Of course the British also used a few horses against Japan, ie in the 3.7 in Pack Howitzer batteries of the Indian Army. Not sure if there were horses in the British mountain batteries in Italy, Of course mules were the primary means of transport for mountain btys.

'Homing' is 'autonomous guidance'.

The war between the King and Parliament was far more significant to the development of western democracy than some brawl between the slave owning classes and the rest. Of course the 30 Years War in Germany between Protestants and Papists was also far more important than that involving mere slave owners on the other side of an ocean.

Interesting that 'accuracy' was one of the criteria, assuming the report is correct. Accuracy has very little to do with the gun (assuming the sights are properly aligned). Accuracy is primarily a function of up to date calibration and current meteor data together with good quality firing table data. If you don't like the latter do your own R&A firings and produce your own FTs. The real problem is that 52 calibre barrels spray the shells around, consistency is not that great which is why AS90 has not had the originally planned 52 cal barrels fitted.

Rather invites the question as to who claims that it is a former Sov special wpns depot. Looking at the photos I say not unless the Sovs were rather stupid. Two points leap out, internal door sills are a stupid idea, even the smallest nucs weigh a bit in their packaging and trolleys of some sort are the easy way to move them. The small doorway also makes a challenge for MHE. Once you get outside you need space and roadways for trucks and MHE to operate in loading them.

Hesco sure as hell beats filing mountains of sandbags or erecting CGI walls and in-filling. Hesco is another good thing that came from Margaret Thatcher staring down the Marxists of the NUM (remember the official who sought asylum in E Germany!). Hesco's inventor was a mining engineer who needed a new job.

All gun designers try to optimise, the technology is well understood. Of course SP guns are easier to deal with because barrel weight is less of a concern than it is for towed guns. And performance does improve as designs develop, for PE an excellent example of this in the c.1960 design barrel used for Abbot and the one not too many years later for light gun, both 105mm, both firing the UK pattern 105mm, but much improved dispersion with light gun.

Actually, it was never suggested that the Bundeswehr had MV radars on their guns pre-Pzh2000, but thanks for confirming that they did not. The point being made was that some armies did and had done so for many years, and hence Pzh2000 doing so was not novel, merely following what others had already done. Ie the German Army was catching up with others. You can't really build guns for low dispersion because range dispersion is caused primarily by round to round variation in MV, and this is a function of ammunition quality control (ie the manufacturing tolerances in the propelling charges and the shell weight and dimensions). Dispersion does increase as the barrel wears, but the tolerances in barrel manufacture are very small, and presumably decreasing as computer controlled machine tools have improved since the 1960s. I would assume that the tolerances in Pzh2000 barrels are about the same as AS90. As for my other comments, I'm merely giving the bigger picture about factors affecting accuracy. It's no use pretending that they don't matter, they do. You have to consider the whole matter systemically, not cherrypick points. Or perhaps it's just ignorance of all the key aspects of artillery.

Rubbish. Many armies have been calibrating their guns for decades. The British field artillery started in WW1, their coast artillery and navy a few years earlier. MV radars were introduced for calibration in the 1960s. The Britsh started fitting them to every gun in the early 1980s. However, these radars only measure MV, this is only one of the 'local' variations. Charge temperature also affects MV and varies almost by the hour. Then there are the meteorological effects throughout the trajectory that effect shells in flight. These also vary continuously, this is why NATO standard meteor messages are produced (typically every two hours) and the data used in the calculation of firing data.

Most howitzers still use propelling charges with increments of various sizes. Modular charges have yet to be widely adopted, but since they reduce cost (in theory) then Treasuries should like them. If you've only deployed a handful of guns then MRSI is probably helpful. Of course it depends on accuracy of predicted fire. It's somewhat pointless if fire has to be adjusted because the benefits of surprise, which is what MRSI exploits, isn't there. My understanding is that in Afg Pzh2000 had to always fire a couple of warming rounds if the guns were cold. This seems to be problem unique to this gun. The merits of doing full calculations on the gun are debateable, processing time won't be noticeably different given up to date computers, and meteor data has to be distributed. However, if you are using gun manoeuvre areas then there are benefits. The risk is a lack of independent gross error checks on firing data.

IIRC Adler was and is the fire control system, ie it does the calculations for each gun and transmits actual firing data to each gun. Whether or not guns leave the position (and how far they get) before the first round lands actually depends on what the times of flight are. All propellant systems are simple, but you still have to have the right number of charge bags in the right order, and mixing high and low angle trajectories means that charges for successive rounds may be larger or smaller, which increases the scope for errors.

I wouldn't make any assumptions whatsoever. If it wasn't in the specification it wouldn't have been developed, whether or not it's been upgraded is another matter. The spec would have been written in 1988-90, and I'm not sure that the concept of MRSI had been recognised at that time.