Artillery and cannons

[Jefffar]

In general terms, assume the range on these weapons is pretty huge, and anything directly hit by them is destroyed.

A cheap (10 dollar) guide to artillery, or one of the lower end (20 dollar) Janes AFV books will have a good set of artillery lists.

[Nekira Sudacne]

also, don't forget, it's immpossible to aim them accuratly at large distances. remember, LOTS of shells went WAY off the mark. it's well nigh impossible to hit a small target, that's why they had to essentially carpet bomb the area.

[Mantisking]

Originally posted by Erick Wujcik.
The classic definition of a mortar goes something like this: "A muzzle-loading gun designed to fire at a high trajectory."

In the early days a mortar was a big stone pot, capable of 'containing' the explosive force of a lot of gunpowder, and give it just a little tilt, so it would blow nearly straight up, but angled enough so the projectile(s) would come smashing down from a great height.

Heh. There's a mortar sitting outside our city library. I'm not sure when it dates from, it may be Civil War era. The muzzle is at least a 1' across, and there's about 1.5' of solid metal all around that. It's huge. I'll have to get the specifics next time I go.

[Mantisking]

Okay. I'm not sure of the provenance of the mortar, but it was given to the city in 1915. There's engraving on the muzzle that reads as follows:
P.
17,280 lbs. No. 1172 J.M.B.
Ft. Pitt Pa. 1862

If you go here and look at the top picture, the black spot over to the side of the building is the mortar. Unfortunately, that's the only picture I can find of it.

[Svartalf]

Are they covered well in Recon? I only have the ones listed in TMNT's Guide to the Universe so far. (Tibetan adventure, 1986 Chi-Com soldier opposition.).

nope, not really, the basic premise in recon is that Arty is what your radio man calls either when you've found the coordinates of something really interesting to blow up (like an enemy ammo dump, or when the whole area near you is so crawling with foes that the high command won't make you pay for the shells out of your own pocket and it's worth the risk of having some land a little too near for comfort.... still, there are a few mortars howitzers and missiles described. if you want th handle th damage conversion from the recon system to the classical palladium, you have something to work from

[Svartalf]

actually, you're correct in that cannonade combat has been around for almost as long as there has been gun powder, but mortars in particular have been around since WWII.

sorry... but one of the very earliest pieces of atillery used (during the 100 year war) was the pot de fer ("iron pot" for you all), basically just that : a big iron pot set with the mouth somewhere between vertical (where the ball would have fallen back on it) and the horizontal (it was bit short for use in direct fire combat... horizontal guns used for direct fire were elongated and called bombards), and it was used for indirect fire... particularly enjoyed uses were sending stone balls or bombs into besieged towns over the walls, or bypassing masses of infantry to attack the infinitely more dangerous cavalry... nothing like a cannonball bursting nearby to spook the horses

[Guest]

Both the Compendium of Contemporary Weapons and the HU GMs Guide have useful rules concerning big guns.

[Jefffar]

There are Infared and Laser guided mortar shells currently in existence.