Mud 'n' tracks

Ron,
glad the field research went well.
thanks for the data,
hope the pics came out.

QUOTE: Originally posted by Poniatowski Well, just got of of a week on Paladins (M109A6's). Hit every target, nobody got hurt so it was all good! Ron

welcome back, SSgt. !
good 2 hear from u, congrats on a great week & thanx 4 that report from the mud pit...
i can almost hear those treads going 'squish squish squish' !

frosty

Ron...I'm sooo jelous. I have been on a track sense 02. We have a M-1 parked in our motor pool just to touch and remember we are 19Ks.

Glad everything turned out good Ron. The observations should come in hany. Look forwar to those pics.

great info, thanks
im doing the tracks for my Panther now, your info is a great help

Ron : I was just curious about something , how do you get the correct angle on the gun to hit a target 12 miles away , I mean you can't see it must be gps and computer now , but before that how did you hit targets ? BTW I am going to finally finish my 109 , after a long hiatus without weathering ( but the base paint looks soooooooo purty !)

Before the AFCS (Automatic Fire Control System) we used a panoramic telescope in the howitzer and a columator outside (it looked like a little telescope on a tripod). The howitzer was put in the general direction (azimuth) of fire by the crew and laid onto an aiming circle, like a surveyor's instrument for fine tuning. Once the gun was laid, the pantel was referred to the collumator in which the cross hairs on the sight matched numbers in the columator. Once the pantel and columator were referred, the pantel's deflection setting for fire missions was moved to 3200 ( meaning the cannon was aimed on the Azimuth of Fire), while a permanent reference on the pantel stayed at what ever the azimuth to the columator was, say 2790 mils or what ever.
Once the columator was in place, aiming stakes and a distant aiming point were set up in case the columator blew over or was moved during a mission. (aiming stakes only were used in WWII)

New deflections from the Fire Direction Control folks were set in the pantel by the gunner and it was re-referred to the columator by traversing the howitzer. Quadrant could be done by the gunner using another setting or by the assistant gunner using a quadrant instrument.

For this system to work, the howitzer had to be emplaced with trail spades so it didn't displace itself when fired (thus moving your lay settings on your aiming devices). Now, with the AFCS, the howitzer knows how much it's moved after each shot and will correct for displacement.... cool, but not as much fun!

Ron.

What about target elevation in regards to the guns elevation (distance to sea level).. I can imagine that the coordinates are 2D (i.e. N,S-E,W), but is there a vertical correction? Isn't it possible that if a target is elevated 200 yards above the NS-EW referance then the shells will fall short of the target, smacking into the scenery, vice versa with the target being lower, thus making the shells overshoot.. Howzatwork?

That's all up to FDC. Way back when, they had charts, slide rules and protractors for figuring out all of that. When I was on A1's we did get missions where we kept bracketing point targets. In cases like that, we corrected quadrant to within the half mil using a gunner's quadrant set on the breech. However, the Paladin now can shoot to within the tenth of a mil.

Ron

....until someone pulls the plug by mistake!!!

Now I ask you, who would want to be on the recieving end of a Paladin Salvo knowing it could shave you closer than a blade razor?

QUOTE: Originally posted by petbat ....until someone pulls the plug by mistake!!!

Oh yeah! It happens! That's when we go into 'degraded ops', which means we fire like we used to! For some reason, all us old guys suddenly become very valuable when that happens.

Ron

Ron, very nice of "Uncle" to let you go help we uniniateated out!

Thank him for us!