105 Light Gun - Short Range Fire

Stovepipe

@gallag, google the "fruit machine" ship's fire computer. Entirely mechanical. i saw one on HMS Belfast in London. Amazing piece of kit....@de Bhal, some guns, like the 25 pdr stood on a platform and could be rotated on the platform. Others, like the Russian D30, have the ability to be traversed thru 360 degrees because they have an inbuilt traversing ring, so the gun crew jack up the wheels, stabilise the platform and can point the gun any direction they like. YooToob is your friend.

tac foley

Actually the D30 has THREE trails located at 120 degrees, and rotates on a pintle that is part of the gun-carriage. Add the fact that like ALL Russian field guns, it also fires a range of anti-armour munitions, and you can see what a brilliantly innovative piece of kit it is. Every Russian Motor Rifle Regiment has/had eighteen/twenty-four of them, and a Motor Rifle Division had three such regiments and a tank regiment - which has the SP version, the 2S1.

tac
[See BRIXMIS Association website]

Stovepipe

Russian attitude to all field guns is that they are also anti tank guns.Germans copied it and issued HEAT and APDS rounds to many artillery pieces. Russian attitude to all hand held rifles and machine guns is that they are all anti aircraft weapons, using the inescapable logic that if you fire up enough steel, some of it is bound to hit and do damage.....the Germans used to complain that anytime they flew anywhere near Russian positions or convoys, everybody fired everything, pistols and Papashas included. One pilot memorably said that, if they could have got the horseshoes off quick enough, they would have thrown them, too. American pilots in Vietnam noted the same thing and called it the "Golden BB" effect; all it took was one lucky shot with a single bullet and you'd lose an aircraft and/or crew.American pilots flying over the North at night noticed twinkling lights whereever they went and duly found out that it was small arms fire, of all available calibres fired at them, even if it had no hope of hitting. It made them fly higher, into the best operational altitude of SAMs and the multitude of 37 and 57mm AA. Sometimes, the simplest logic is the best.

tac foley

One of the things that puzzled those of us who live in the West was the way that Russians used 'mils'. The mil is an actual measurement - the angle subtended by one meter at a distance of one thousand meters, but altering physics did not bother the Sovs. .

As you know, a full circle is comprised of 6400 mils, easily divided into four 1600s - 1600, 3200, 4800, 6400. The Sovs thought that was just waaaaaaay to complex for their serf-like common soldiery to comprehend. They figured out that since most of them could probably tell the time, why not divide the circle into just 6000 mils? That way, they could easily transpose mils into minutes, just like telling the time and adding a zero or two where appropriate.

So, fer'instance, twenty-past something became 2000 mils... S'easy.

tac

discus

http://forces.tv/10503849

Seems that there's another ban on firing the L31 HE shell. I've never been on site when a round has detonated prematurely, not something I feel I've missed out on :pac:

ohnonotgmail

tac foley wrote: »

One of the things that puzzled those of us who live in the West was the way that Russians used 'mils'. The mil is an actual measurement - the angle subtended by one meter at a distance of one thousand meters, but altering physics did not bother the Sovs. .

As you know, a full circle is comprised of 6400 mils, easily divided into four 1600s - 1600, 3200, 4800, 6400. The Sovs thought that was just waaaaaaay to complex for their serf-like common soldiery to comprehend. They figured out that since most of them could probably tell the time, why not divide the circle into just 6000 mils? That way, they could easily transpose mils into minutes, just like telling the time and adding a zero or two where appropriate.

So, fer'instance, twenty-past something became 2000 mils... S'easy.

tac

Its an error of approx 6% but when you can bring as many guns to bear as they can its probably close enough.

John_D80

ohnonotgmail wrote: »

Its an error of approx 6% but when you can bring as many guns to bear as they can its probably close enough.

I don't think it means there will be an error at all actually. It's just another means of expressing an angle. They don't actually lose the other 400 mils.

tac foley

'zackly - it's just that their mils are 'bigger' - the angles of 1600 REAL mils and 1500 Soviet mils are the same angular measurement. Both are also 90 degrees.

tac

Manic Moran

tac foley wrote: »

One of the things that puzzled those of us who live in the West was the way that Russians used 'mils'. The mil is an actual measurement - the angle subtended by one meter at a distance of one thousand meters, but altering physics did not bother the Sovs. .

As you know, a full circle is comprised of 6400 mils, easily divided into four 1600s - 1600, 3200, 4800, 6400. The Sovs thought that was just waaaaaaay to complex for their serf-like common soldiery to comprehend. They figured out that since most of them could probably tell the time, why not divide the circle into just 6000 mils? That way, they could easily transpose mils into minutes, just like telling the time and adding a zero or two where appropriate.

So, fer'instance, twenty-past something became 2000 mils... S'easy.

tac

Well, the problem there is that there are actually about 6,283 mils in a circle. (OK, 6,283.18531 or so. It's 2,000 x pi.). NATO rounded up 120 or so to get 6,400. The Soviets rounded down 280 to get 6,000. A few countries went with 6,300 which may be most accurate, but makes my brain hurt.

galwaycyclist

John_D80 wrote: »

I don't think it means there will be an error at all actually. It's just another means of expressing an angle. They don't actually lose the other 400 mils.

Unless you are using captured weapons. I guess if you had just come in to possession of a WarPac artillery piece and wanted to use it on its former owners then you would need to adjust the bearing accordingly.

John_D80

galwaycyclist wrote: »

Unless you are using captured weapons. I guess if you had just come in to possession of a WarPac artillery piece and wanted to use it on its former owners then you would need to adjust the bearing accordingly.

Wha??

galwaycyclist

John_D80 wrote: »

Wha??

I would assume its like being handed a compass thats in degrees when your route card is in mils.

You would need to adjust the bearing you apply to the compass to take account of differences in the units of measurement.

John_D80

galwaycyclist wrote: »

I would assume its like being handed a compass thats in degrees when your route card is in mils.

You would need to adjust the bearing you apply to the compass to take account of differences in the units of measurement.

Ah got you now!! ;-)

Sorry, I've been awake for a very long time so I may have missed an obvious point in your previous post.