Artillery Practices by the Major Combatants of WWII (opens in new tab)

Not a very well developed thesis on Artillery. If the author is reading, please get a copy of Dunnigan's How to Make War which describes in detail how to calculate the various effectiveness of different artillery strategies. I've got a dog eared copy of the 2nd edition I was using while writing my 'ultimate replacement for Bright's empire' game (unfinished :-) But overall, in the context of war gaming it is an excellent reference.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/How-Make-Fourth-Edition-Comprehensive/...

Comparison point, top of line modern artillery round (Excalibur [1]) can be used for somewhat precision strikes nowadays. Often a limiting factor in the feasibility of a fire mission is the proximity of friendly forces, so those kinds of guided artillery shells are useful in that context.

The only issue is the cost. Back in the military, firing excalibur shells (or hellfires from drones) was compared to throwing Ferraris on the head of farmers. The device costs more than the cost of paving the road they're digging their IED into. When you're doing those fire missions and thinking about the absurdity... it's an odd thing.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M982_Excalibur

WRT American pre-calculation and its relationship to software...

One of the great personal epiphanies of my professional career was the discovery of data pre-computation FLOABW. More specifically, what I'm talking about is data denormalization.

I had always been aware of caching techniques, but beyond that, data normalization was so ingrained into my mindset, that storing any piece of data that could otherwise be derived from another seemed like heresy, something only an amateur or fool would do.

What really opened my eyes, was when I was forced to build a social network atop MongoDB (ouch), and I had to resolve the incompatibility of relational data, but with atomic write, with no join or transactional support. What I discovered, was that if care was taken to create a canonical representation of the data, a multitude of query-able denormalized derived tables could be utilized, and could in fact offer dramatically superior performance compared to its RDBMS equivalent. What was especially shocking, was how obvious this was in retrospect and how blinded I was by the assumption that perfect data consistency was a requirement for all software.

I now view most tasks with the consideration, "What would this look like if we ignored efficiency in favor of raw performance and might that be worth it?"

The fact that we in the US had put so much effort into researching and implementing artillery coordination techniques shows how our military was part of a huge national effort to play the international strategic game at the top level, in the early 20th century. Both Churchill and FDR were products of organizations (Navy) that made these ruthless and cold calculations based on technology and pragmatic geopolitics. Whoever put together the requirements for the artillery system, the M1 Garand, the Fletcher class destroyer, and the Flying Fortress was out to build world-beating weapons. In the context of when they were developed, these things read a bit like sci-fi.

I wonder if the Americans' books of tables were generated by automated computers.

You'd think the Germans would find their own way to such a dominant approach -- especially as it was so suited to mobile warfare, which they were reinventing early in the war. An absence of the technical resources to generate the tables would be one explanation for why they didn't.

Strange article. "Any good tactical game must account for the difference in artillery practices - based on notes I can't find, a speaker I can't remember, references I can't source, and throwing in some of my own guesswork and conjecture."

I love that this comes from the perspective of game development.

Also, I am surprised elevation wasn't taken into account more by the British and American forces. You'd think that would be one of the bigger issues when doing ballistics.

As always, the fastest way to perform a calculation is to as much work as possible when the clock isn't running. In this case, pre-compute every possible solution months ahead of time, and have a cabinet full of look-up tables.

Another historical sidenote: the American approach to artillery directly drove the development of modern computers. ENIAC, the first digital computer, was originally commissioned as a project for computing gunnery tables. Although, because von Neumann got wind of it, its first actual computation was (I think) numeric integration of fluid dynamics for the H-bomb.

The link seems to have exceeded its bandwidth. The Internet Archive has a version here: https://web.archive.org/web/20141026151912/http://etloh.8m.c... (And it appears to be basically unchanged since June 2000, which explains the lack of sources that some commenters have objected to.)