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Igor -> RE: RE: (2/7/2004 5:11:27 AM)
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It's difficult to really model the American and British experience with fire control; because it wasn't really a neat mechanical matter of guns, tactics, and flight times.
The problem with just looking at the American technical ability to deliver fire is that this overlooks the politics of fire control. Historically, control of the guns having been assigned, whoever had them tended to refuse outright to fire missions not requested by their own FOs (they might, after all, need them themselves at some point). This could be worked around by going up the chain; but that added a lot of time.
Case in point, the Audy Murphy story. He had no technical right to call in fire (not being a divisional FO), and certainly had no guns assigned to him. Had the divisional commander not been on the net at that moment, then the request would have been refused, he would have been killed, and the Germans would have continued on their way. Since permission was instantly forthcoming, he got elite FO response times from an entire battalion of 105s. But how do we model this? Random availability and response times for non-FO units requesting non-organic fire support?
As for the British Stonk; yes, it could deliver a heck of a lot of fire (especially since, unlike the Americans, they tended to assume the FO knew what he was doing when he asked for every gun in range). But again, how do we model the random availability of batteries not even in the same corps as the requesting FO? This could make a divisional FO worth a vast number of points on the off chance he could whistle up 200 tubes on a 1.2 turn delay.
Just in passing, the Time of Target barrage was *never* responsive. It required massive amounts of coordination and calculation to determine just when to fire each tube to get to the target(s) simultaneously; and there was just no way a pre-computerized field artillery branch could do that in real time. The dawn barrage of July 4, 1944 was a typical example; after massive calculations, all of the targets were struck simultaneously.
If you want to use one, then create an MRL unit firing large aircraft bombs with very limited ammo and a high ROF, and insert it into a scenario as a pre-game bombardment weapon. As a special treat, a late war American option would be to do the same with large bore cluster munitions instead of bombs (with the HE armor penetration set to 2); this would be a TOT barrage with proximity fuzed rounds. Murder on infantry, not too dangerous to anything with top armor, and no awkward craters.
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