Posted on 08/21/2004 3:34:34 PM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl
They don't use paper maps near as much as they used to. They have GPS and Plugger and Blue Force Tracker displaying information electronically.
Although they didn't belong to the Marines, I passed a convoy of these "big guns" on 71hwy in Missouri last year. I counted 35 guns being towed, along with support trucks.
All I could think was "GodSpeed," and "Give 'em Hell!"
Mark
I would have made a good artillery man since I could not fly like DAD due to glasses. Thanks all who responded.
You don't give them windage. Just give them a good grid, or polar plot, or shift from a target reference point, and they will put it where you told them to put it. Infantry is the Queen of Battle, and the reason Artillery is King is because Artillery puts the balls where the Queen wants 'em.
There are occasional short rounds, but there isn't much you can do about them.
That is sooo funny! Even my wife,who doesn't know anything about artillery and the like, was ROTF!
I could but it would hurt your brain.
I dunno why they continue to drag the 198 around.
But the 119 is fun to drag about.
;-)
Or strap INSIDE a CH-46, or sling underneath, or..
*chuckle*
This is a great thread. Thanks for posting.
Arty deserves it, but it sucks that they got the 'King of Battle' moniker. It is the coolest name and can never be topped. If you want arty, you gotta call "the King"
5.56mm
Hard lessons learned in WWII. One example: The Russians were able to hold Stalingrad and break the Wehrmacht because the Krauts leveled the city, providing almost limitless cover for the Russians to fight from.
When we leveled the Benedictine monestary on top of Monte Cassino in Italy with a huge bomber strike, we totally detroyed the structure, but killed few Germans. When the dust settled, they simply had a million new fighting positions.
That's what is being referred to, I think.
Yes that is probably true. But we did not bomb the rubble and the Germans didn't have B-1B's and B-52's.
Yup we are the Balls of the Queen.
ROTFLOL!!
I served in the 2/11FA 25th ID, my last hitch in the Army. I was chief computer in the FDC. That's funny!
LMAO!
It's about at this point where the the "customer" usually starts calling you a mother$%^*&# and banging his radio handset against a rock.
I know this is a late reply, but we used to calculate corrections to the basic ballistic data, azimuth and distance to the target and differential in gun/target altitude, for propellant temperature, air temperature and density and of course wind speed and direction through the several layers of atmosphere through which the projectile traveled through its arc on the way to the target, plus the rotation of the earth while under the projectile during its time of flight and for the different weights of the various types of projectiles like high explosives, smoke, white phosphorus etc. We also applied corrections for wear and tear on the tubes of the individual cannons based on registration data from actual firing tests.
During the time I was in the Field Artillery, 1966 through 1980, we did it with slide rules and paper and pencils. We had tabular firing tables, and graphical firing tables which were specialized slide rules. We did have a primitive comnputer called a FADAC (Field Artillery Digital Automatic Computer) that rarely worked and when it did was slower getting the data than a good Spec4 with a slide rule.
We received meteorological data periodically to update our met corrections and calculations had to be done to properly apply the met data which we used for a brief period of time. the met calculations took about ten or fifteen meinutes to complete and we would use the met data for a couple of hours until we got a new set of data.
IIRC it took us about three minutes from receiving a call for fire to getting initial data worked up and transmitted to the guns. Subsequent data for adjusting rounds and fire for effect took under a minute.
We did a lot of math without calculators or computers and took a great deal of pride in our speed and accuracy.
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