I always looked at the project buying very little truly heavy military hardware.

It's conspicuos, raises all the wrong attention, not to mention it's big, bulky and hard to conceal,

More likely the project would set up specialised teams near, or possibly staffing military bases with the aim of stealing what they need when the time is right,

So they would use political influence to encourage the creation of depots in wilderness areas, poorly staffed, safe from the bombs and ready to be taken over.

Though I suspect they would be more interested in add on sensors and control fins for ordinary mortor rounds. Something like the Copperhead and Merlin systems that would take advantage of projects technological systems. To squeeze more value from smaller 81mm rounds or occasonal artillery rounds

Or ... near National Guard posts. For my 'classic era' campaign, I worked up the equipment near Santa Rosa, California as an example:

579th Engineer Battalion

* 579th Headquarters Support Company (Santa Rosa): about 30 M998 Humvees, couple dozen big trucks (including some M809 five-ton trucks), dozen or so cranes and other construction stuff, M728 CEV on display

* 579th Forward Support Company (Santa Rosa): shelter, food, utilities, and a couple dozen trucks

* 132nd Engineer Company (Mount Shasta and Eureka): multi-role bridge building; lots of trucks, construction vehicles, a couple dozen M998 Humvees or M151 Mutts

* 120th Engineer Detachment (Lakeport, on Clear Lake): concrete finishing; two big flatbed trailer trucks, truck with lowbed trailer for carrying equipment, one other truck, plus a couple of M998 Humvees or M151 "mutts"

On October 17, 1989, the 579th mobilized in response to the Loma Prieta Earthquake. The first mission was the construction of a parking lot for the Bay Bridge commuter ferry and the second was to assist in debris clearing and removal in the Santa Cruz area. They had just returned from those tasks and had not entirely demobilized when World War III took place.

Of course, nothing says all this stuff will be sitting around undisturbed 5 years after an Atomic War (let alone 150 years).

There's also the Sierra Army Depot, which has held hundreds or thousands of "the previous generation" of tanks in storage. M60s before the M1 came around, and now has the older M1 tanks.

http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/1...-but-no-tanks/

Of course, it's on the target list, but it's a huge, sprawling base.

--
Michael B.

In the T2k forum there recently was a post on the NATO rapid reaction force. They used a 105mm Pack howitzer until 1975.

OTO Melara Mod 56

The facts that they were retired at a perfect time for the project, and that they can be broken into 12 ~125kg parts makes them really promising as an option for my project.

The project just needs to buy them as scrap metal, perhaps manufacturing only the barrel (as I expect it would be tapped and replacements would be desired post oops).

I also had my project buy retired manufacturing equipment (as those jobs moved overseas) as scrap metal so that part of the cover story would match up nicely.

Completely disagree.

Building a colossal project to rebuild the Nation, and restart the United States would really lose credibility for the project and the restored government if looting government facilities and military assets are necessary.

There is quite a lot of military hard ware directly fielded by the Morrow Project up to C-130 Hercules and CH-47 Chinook aircraft.

The MARS One while not conventional military isn't going to pass unnoticed.

I, admit I chucked that one out and the HAAM suit too.

Military equipment is a known quantity. It has been tested, people are trained to use it, and spare parts are found in quantity.

I like it. Probably for the MARS teams that have the Rocky Mtns, Sierra Nevada Mtns, and Cascade Mtns.

One civilian application of howitzers is avalanche control using HE to shake snow loose when you want it to fall.

The Projects military forces are quite modest. Most of its equipment are only slightly heavier than a well equipped SWAT team would be packing. Even MARS1 and SCIENCE1 vehicles are little more than mobile bases packing some good firepower into mobile packages.

The heaviest piece of artillery the project seems to have is am 81mm mortar with a range of 3 miles.

Meaning that if a local warlord or crazed politician helped themselves to the local National Guard Armoury and they had a few 105mm light guns or invaders from Cuba or Mexico crossed the border the project is finished. Even old versions of these sorts of weapons having treble the range at least and able to pound any Morrow encampment into dust.

The project can't just buy this equipment, where would you even store a dozen heavy guns, the vehicles to move them and tonnes of ammunition?

Not to mention the Project isn't a military endeavour. Investing in the capacity to pound distant targets feels like giving up before you started.

As such the project funded as was their usual want in sophisticated solutions.
If they couldn't get range and weight of power, they would go for speed and accuracy.

They invested heavily in the companies that produced the MERLIN and STRIX guided missile rounds. As well as a few 120mm mortars to fire the strix and trained a small elite core of MARS and RECON artillery operators. Also investing in laser range finders and light weight ballistic computers to make the most of this capacity. These guided rounds were also equipped with rocket based range extenders and given the option of laser designation as opposed to thermal seeker heads.

The idea being a project spots a potential target, say the purported warlord and his artillery park. They park a spotter with a laser designator on a nearby hill. Then drive up a couple of Hummers a few miles away get half a dozen rounds in the air and get away as fast as possible, while the observer guides them in. If possible only using expensive guided rounds for the first couple and following up with dumb shots.

It was an expensive, awkward compromise and only ever accounted for 10% of mortar shells. A similar tactic was tried with loading 120 mm mortars and counter battery radars onto 2.5-tonne trucks.

Certainly a solution as is the Israeli 8 pack of surface to surface missiles.

How do you procure these? What is it going to cost? How do you find trained operators? How do you train new operators?

105mm is ridiculously common and cheap to manufacture. The Project can have a range in a western State with a manufacturing license for international sales.

There is a company ATK, right here in Colorado.

http://www.orbitalatk.com/defense-sy...ament-systems/

I think I am missing something here - how do you guys see the Project using or needing artillery? Arty is normally something that is deployed as part of a substantial combined arms force, it requires it's own set of perishable skills as well as a substantial investment in equipment (plus supplies, spares, and storage space!), and requires a large target area and/or forward observers. None of this sounds like the Project to me.

If artillery pieces are wide spread in TMP, then it means a lot of teams having to learn them and maintain them and practice with them and drag them around with them. And that seems like a lot of time and money and space that could be best used for other things in an organization that is supposed to be more about rebuilding than waging war.

If artillery pieces are rare, then they are almost never going to be where they are needed when they are needed* and they are almost never going to be in the kinds of concentrations that make artillery really useful on the battlefield. By the time you move artillery into place, you have other options to remove the enemy threat.

So where is the balance point where artillery is worth having?

*: This is also my argument against other rare beasts like the MARS-1 vehicles, unicorns that excite players but don't seem to serve a real purpose. The Project has few men and few aircraft a lot of territory, assets outside a hundred mile radius of a given problem are likely out of play.

I disagree. Artillery are indirect fire weapons, they require training and infrastructure to use, they require forward observers, and they are not tremendously mobile (and when they are in motion they are generally inoperable!). Even if a team walks into a targeted area with an observation post they are unlikely to be directly taken out if they are in their vehicles, and taking out the vehicles is likely to require a direct hit (unless they are in something like an XR311). Given the mobility of a typical team, getting killed by artillery is generally going to require bad luck, bad planning, or the kind of enemy force that is gross overkill for a game.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/milita...-50/figf-1.gif

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XoQ4U3KmJ0...mp_Carroll.jpg

http://www.carlisle.army.mil/ahec/trail/Vietnam/

And was a part of some Green Beret camp equipment in Vietnam. I would like a more varied mortar section, and stuff like this for special groups. The M102 would make quite a dragon for the team to slay. An M226 60MM mortar has a place in light team's special item list.

Artillery has one huge advantage it allows you to hit your opponent from a convenient range. Anything else means your valuabl, irreplacable having to get within getting clobbered range of the enemy.

Probably the aim of most MORROW engagements would be distance and ambush. No safer way of doing that than from miles away with a couple of hills in the way.

The problem would be doing this with equipment light enough to get dragged around by a big jeep.

I always think the Project would probably copy a lot of SADF equipment from the 70s and 80s, when not going hitech. Cheap easily, produced, durable and able to get dragged for 100s of kilometers by truck around rough ground.

Probably the Valkiri would be a great sucker punch weapon. Find a big encampment of bandits, then with one blow send them scuttling away. A blow that could be loaded on the back of a very ordinary medium truck.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valkiri

This is not a bad idea, though logistical issues with new weapon systems has often been mentioned in threads to argue against them. The Hydra 70 is already in the Morrow arsenal. Mounting 4 M200A1 pods on a trailer or truck bed would give you 36 2.75" rockets. Though to be effective, you would need to have APKWS added to the inventory. Otherwise with the small warhead and the large dispersal pattern of surface to surface fire of Hydra 70 that are unguided makes them much less effective.

The Project has limited personnel, limited resources, and limited storage/transport capability. Artillery requires abundant personnel, abundant resources, and abundant storage/transport capability. The trend in Project weapons should be towards precision as much as possible, and away from "area suppression". MLRS is a particularly bad idea, a weapon that requires a dedicated vehicle and fires an entire truckload of ammunition at once.

If the Project needs to fight a large army, it needs to do so by identifying and eliminating key elements with precision munitions, not blanketing a region with mostly-wasted dumb munitions.

Agreed, which is why APKWS would be needed to put the Hydra 70 in a comparable role. They cannot be fired en mass like the Valkiri, but with a forward observer doing laser painting, the APKWS would not need to saturate the area, seeing as it is able to place the impact within a couple meters.

It seems the obvious choice, but I doubt the Project would buy it off the shelf.

Better to buy a bunch of kits for modifying preexisting 2.75 rockets, TOW missiles and mortar rounds.

Maybe accompanied by some sort of early drone with a laser designator.

The idea being that where as buying giant stock piles of ancient warheads for destruction makes sense. Indeed they might even get paid to dispose of it, then update at it at their own convenience. Works out better than someone in the FBI going, "so where are all these laser guided bombs going?"

I think a fairly good idea for Morrow supplies is to be careful with anything that might make the Secret Service say,

"You could assasinate the President with this!"

nb The Israelis in the 1980s added laser homing kits to their TOW missiles and bigger engines then called them LAHATS. The SADF bought them, copied the design etc and called them Ingwes and used them to destroy many SWAPO/Cuban tanks. So this hobby craft approach to improving on primitive weapons isn't so unusual.

That describes the entire Morrow arsenal. Seriously, every Team deploys with a host of military weapons not legally available to common citizens. While it is true that some are more tightly controlled than others, Morrow resources should mean that if the government gets suspicious they are more likely to think "illegal arms sales" or such than "assassinate the President".

You are pretty much describing APKWS. It is a guidance module that is placed between the Mk 60 motor and the warhead/fuze assembly. It is not much more complicated than screwing APKWS to the motor and the warhead to the APKWS.

Um........MLRS can shoot rockets one at a time if desired. The rockets themselves are pretty precise with the launcher knowing it location with GPS and inertial navigation. MLRS has more options than submunitions and the ATACMS. Further, most modern anti tank submunitions steer themselves toward large metallic heat sources.

Further, MLRS is used for counter battery fire and more importantly the "Deep fires" missions that the large 203mm guns used to perform........ hitting when the other guy can't hit back and raining hell on his rear area concentrations or movement corridors.

Probably why it is used extensively by the KFS.

One of the major problems for the French and later the Americans in Viet Nam was the soviet supplied 130mm D-30 howitzers.... Getting hit and you can't hit back because the other guy can shoot further and accurately too ....... well, that really, really pegs the suck-o-meter at maximum.

Battery fire / Counter Battery fire works in two scenarios..... their tubes fire first or yours fire first.

Their tubes fire first....... preferable... You get all yours to fire back.

You fire first......
Your self propelled is moving immediately upon completion of their fire mission....... towed is waiting.... tied with counter battery radar. When the enemy fires his counter battery mission , your towed fires theirs in counter-counter battery. MLRS is in the commanders tool box with two important missions....... immediate suppression and counter battery fire. The MLRS in counter battery is excellent. The basic package outranges most gun artillery and with the larger affected impact area doesn't need precision to be overwhelmingly effective. You're raining mixed AP and AT submuntions (some with internal guidance) onto a 1km by 1 km square.

Immediate suppression is to disrupt or delay and enemy breakthrough of your own positions again by wrecking everything in a very large impact area.

I have to stand corrected. I made an incorrect assumption about the 127mm rocket used on the Valkiri. After doing research, the Denel V3 is a copy of the AIM-9/MIM-72 Chaparral. As the AIM-9 is in the Morrow supply chain, a "dumbed down" version for the Valkiri is not unreasonable addition to the supply with little additional training needed for Project members handling them.

Stats for heavy pieces can be useful if the KFS decides it needs more advanced tools to counter Morrow teams or even Krell, surely his minions haven't missed the expansion detailed in "Fall Back".

They are pretty precise (a) for artillery and (b) assuming that they have GPS. Artillery is not generally needed to be very precise and the control system on the MLRS warhead is engineering to that standard - you won't put one through a window without a heck of a lot of luck. And Morrow cannot plan on having GPS, perhaps just at first, perhaps not until someone creates a new space program. There are alternatives, but they quickly get ugly for missiles.

I don't see why TMP would be performing these kinds of long-range attacks unless we are talking about the thousands against thousands kind of conflict that TMP is intrinsically poorly positioned to fight. If you are targeting an enemy 20+miles away, how do you have good intelligence on who you are targeting, and what are the odds that they have conveniently isolated themselves from the kind of collateral damage you cannot afford? If you are in a counter-battery operation, you are either facing an enemy well beyond your ability to handle (i.e., LARGE) or you are facing an enemy that could be taken down by other tools and tactics.