Artillery usage?

[Hanu]

S!

I have served in Finnish defence forces in artillery, calculating shooting-values (or how do you call them in english) for Field artillery battery. So I have a few questions about artillery modeling.

-How many tubes there are in SB field battery? 6? 4? Question is very relevant as when you order fire you do not select Fire Unit, but amount of tubes! (which is quite awkward to me) So if I choose incorrect amount of tubes, the fire unit does not fire with every in every gun before they change position because of counter-battery fire.

-Also how do I know if battery has received any losses that they cannot compele the fire mission. So does SB then use a new unit to "fill" the missing tubes, thus wasting rest of their tubes? IMO you should be able to order a specific unit to carry out the mission, and not tubes.

So are supporting artillery only modeled as individual tubes, and are artillery losses modeled in SB?
Or do you only send a request about the volume (amount of tubes), and artillery commander then processes the request and orders the most suitable units for the mission and carries it out as best effort?

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Yesterday I was doing the training missions: I selected the pre-defined target from pull-down menu and ordered FASCAM mission there; it took 20 minutes and all the targets were long gone by then. I'd say it should take 2-5 minutes in RL to pre-defined target, so what I was doing wrong? Ok, if individual TC (not arty forward observer) request for fire I understand the long delay, but the training mission is impossible now IMO.

Regards

[Hanu]

Ok, after browsing several forums I found that training mission is bugged, so thats it, but if anybody knows any answers to those actual questions I'd really appreciate it.

[DrDevice]

The number of tubes per platoon is set in the scenario editor. A good designer will tell you how many tuber per platoon so that you can use them most efficiently. If not, you would have to crack open the .sce in the editor and look.

There is no model for modeling battery losses, or even knowing when a given battery is online and ready to fire or displacing. The delay is simply longer for a platoon's worth of tubes following a fire mission.

[ShotMagnet]

As a convention, it'd be nice if we who make these things started referring to artillery support in terms of tubes per platoon; for example, if I've made a mission which has 6 platoons of six guns each, I'd include in the briefing that the relevant side has '6-6 with HE/Smoke', referring to those six platoons and the six guns they each have.

There's a good reason to do this; artillery usage is platoon-dependent, if you obligated (using the example above) during a mission 7 tubes you'll have (if I recall correctly) actually obligated 2 platoons even though you only called for seven of the 12 tubes available in those two platoons. The remaining five guns, (again going from recall), if not used for a fire mission beforehand, will become unavailable when the other seven have completed their fire mission. Likewise, those five will remain unavailable until the platoon they're part of is again returned to service.

It seems like a smart idea, therefore to note not just how many tubes are available, but in how many platoons, so that the smart player can economize smartly his calls for fire.


Shot