Artillery and the Twilight 2000 Soldier
From 1939 to 1985 artillery was the biggest killer at war.
This is no generalisation. A study over that period titled "Development of Protection Technologies" published in the June 2009 issue of Defence Technology Review, ballistic casualties in general war, including World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Israel, and the Falklands were recorded as 59% from projectile fragments, only 19% from bullets, and 22% from other causes.
Obviously artillery has a place in the Twilight 2000 game.
However as an adventure device it's awful. Players understandably dislike not having the ability to strike back in some way and their ability to influence artillery's lethal power over them is limited to mitigation techniques, primarily relocating or taking cover. Due to this nearly all GMs leave it out of their games (the same as proper sniper attacks).
However, it can still be used - albeit carefully.
Firstly, artillery doesn't automatically hit.
Weather (you guys don't have every game on a cloudless and still summer afternoon do you?) can disperse fires, spreading out the rounds so that even accurate shots don't all hit on target. Shifting targets like moving player vehicles can land in front or behind, signally to the players that the enemy will shift fire soon. Bad weather can lower the gunner's effectiveness, serving the guns in a heavy rainstorm just makes everything harder as the gunners slog about in deep mud. The guns might physically shift in bad positions, meaning the dispersion of their fire is increased.
NPCs using artillery on players have to take many things into account.
Gunners don't live attached to their guns and the artillery and its command might not be ready for shooting. The guns might be pointing the wrong way, some guns such as the Soviet 122 mm howitzer 2A18 (D-30) have a 360º traverse but most do not, meaning the weapon's trails have to be physically shifted to aim at the target. The guns might be remote and may have to be moved to be in range of the target and that alone can take hours as the guns don't just have to be pulled down, hitched up and towed to the new firing position but that position also has to be scouted and secured all while the artillery convoy is protected. Once there the guns have to be oriented on the map, the fire mission calculated and so on. This is especially hard if the players have annoyingly moved in the meantime.
If artillery is pre-ranged on an area there may well be signs of it in the mess left after previous fire missions, alerting the players to the unhealthy condition of the location. Ranging markers might be found in the area, alerting players to the danger.
Finally, there might be mitigating factors that limit the effectiveness of the munitions. Artillery shells are meant to come in almost vertically and don't explode in a sphere of unhappiness, but rather as a disc with a lessened danger zone on front and behind the shell. Direct fire artillery is more dangerous to the sides of the line of fire than to the front angles or behind, although this is only relative and if you're close you might have a lessened fragmentation threat to some degree but the shockwave is still the same. Fuzes might contain high levels of duds as happened during the initial stages of The Great War due to poor manufacture. Clever direct-fire gunners try and hit above or just behind infantry if they have the option as infantry to get cover in front first.
Artillery uses different fuzing and this directly modifies the effects of the munition. "Super-Fast" fuzes detonate instantly on contact with anything and produce a ground burst, individuals in field positions such as rubble sangars, trenches or other fighting positions have a significantly lessened fragmentation danger. "Proximity Fuzes" detonate above the target and this can be set before shooting, the distances are variable depending on the fuze type (many have variable distances that can be set) and some of these also have a Super Fast setting in case the Proximity setting fails. These are extremely dangerous as the can burst above firing positions or individuals in the open and cause maximum casualties. They are offset by having overhead cover. Note that as they burst above the ground they have a slightly reduced blast effect. Finally "Delay Fuzes" detonate a fraction of a second after contact allowing them to penetrate cover and detonate behind it or to dig into earthworks and detonate for maximum effect beside or inside the position.
There are many other types of fuzes. Some fuzes such as the US M734 fuze have the following settings (from wikipedia):
PRX = Proximity air burst between 3 and 13 feet
NSB = Near surface burst between 0 and 3 feet
IMP = Impact burst on contact. (In the event an IMP setting fails, detonation is 1/2 second after impact.)
DLY = Delay after impact of 0.05 seconds in the fuze explosive train before the shell detonates.
In all four settings, the high explosive in the mortar shell is detonated by a cascading explosive train of four increasing energies within the fuze. These are the Microdet electric detonator, the explosive lead, the explosive booster, and the delay primer assembly functioning as follows:
In the PROX, NSB, and IMP fuze settings, a firing circuit applies a voltage to the small Microdet which faces and ignites a bigger explosive lead that channels into the explosive booster which initiates the shell's high explosive.
In the DLY setting, the explosive lead is initiated instead by the delay primer assembly, which operates even in the event of power supply or electronics failures.
Reliability against duds is increased by the fact that if the M734 fails to detonate the mortar shell at one setting, it will immediately and automatically use the next one along, i.e. failure at the PRX setting causes NSB detonation to be selected. Similarly, failure to detonate at the NSB setting will automatically cause IMP to be selected, and so on.
This redundancy is a safety factor designed to prevent malfunctioning mortar shells from being buried upon ground impact and becoming a risk to civilians after a battle or becoming ammunition for enemy activities.
However it is likely that as the war ground on and the vast amount of fuzes were expended simpler, single-setting fuzes would return in large numbers and the gunners might have the wrong fuzes for the task. Proximity Fuzes with their multifunctional uses and high lethality would probably be expended firstly, followed by the various instant fuzes. This might once again ameliorate player casualties.
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