Artillery smoke availability

[chuckfourth]

Hello
It seems all in-game off map and on-map aritllery can fire smoke. However probably half or more of these guns didnt have a smoke round. As an example look at http://www.tarrif.net/ This site only shows smoke for the German 105mm standard divisional field piece, one of the 150mm guns and the 120mm mortar. Leaving the German 75mm, 77mm, 17cm, 21cm guns and 81mm mortar all without smoke, which they do have in-game.
It would seem sensible that the smaller guns wouldn't have a smoke round as these small shells wouldnt produce much smoke. The larger calibre corps type artillery, usually 15cm and up wouldnt have smoke rounds either as they dont conduct this sort of fire mission. Corps artillery fire missions are typically counterbattery, interdiction or targets deep in the enemy rear ie smoke not required. Also the chain of command is longer to the corps weapons. Laying of smoke normally needs to be coordinated with an infantry advance and so we would want a good direct link with the units firing, ie using our "own" divisions guns
For on-board artillery, this site lists these weapons as not having smoke rounds. Youll need to sign in to see it.
http://www.stormpages.com/garyjkenne...try%20Guns.htm
Russian 50mm Mortar
Italian brixia Mortar
German 5cm Mortar
German 75mm infantry gun
Japanese 70mm infantry gun.
in-game they have smoke.
Also from a russian site currently offline, see
http://www.battlefield.ru/guns/project_4.html
http://www.battlefield.ru/guns/project_1.html
http://www.battlefield.ru/guns/project_2.html
But when they were up they show no smoke for the Russian guns calibres 122mm, 152mm 210mm and 280mm
Some other points,
Rocket units in the game can fire smoke. As far as I can make out smoke rockets actually weren't made (nebelwerferfer may be the exception). This makes sense to me as Rockets lack accuraccy, a prerequisite for smoke delivery.
I think currently smoke persistence is related to visibility? Actually I think it should be related to wind speed. As wind speed is not modelled in the game then maybe the value of smoke persistence should be random rather than related to visibility?
Happy to supply a list of which guns did and did not have a smoke round of course.
Maybe it would be possible for off board artillery to have a total of say 80 shells and fire them as either smoke or HE as required? ie can fire 80 HE or 80 smoke.
Regards chuck

[PatG]

I am not going to dispute your references however, your post contains 2 inaccuracies which only serve to weaken your case.

1) 81mm mortars are certainly big enough to fire a very useful smoke round - a night shoot with 81mm WP is an impressive thing - I've done it.

2) Accuracy is not necessarily a requirement for a smoke throwing weapon - you really want controlled dispersal over a fairly wide area to establish the screen. This is why the nebelwerfers were so good at it.

[DRG]

The short answer is there are no plans to change the way smoke is issued to artillery units . However, checking into this revelled another issue with the smoke that we issue to heavy arty units that we will look into in the future. Basically the really big guns are not supposed to be getting smoke and currently they are. However there are no plans to assign smoke on an individual gun by gun basis.

Don

[chuckfourth]

Hi Don
Fair enough that you would not want to look at each individual weapon to allocate smoke this is a lot of work, though I am of course willing to do this for you if you become interested in the future. I would just point out that if your looking at Heavy Artillery then you may want to have a quick look at rockets as well, as except for nebelwerfer none of these should have smoke capabilty (That I have been able to find anyway. Of course I am willing to look more thouroughly into rockets also.)
Thanks for your time Chuck.

[DRG]

chuckfourth said:
Hi Don
Fair enough that you would not want to look at each individual weapon to allocate smoke this is a lot of work, though I am of course willing to do this for you if you become interested in the future.

Not very likely as WinSPMBT would need it done as well and that means virtually every artillery piece used in the later 2/3 of the 20th century and the first 1/5 of the 21st century for every nation in the game would need to be researched so I am quite happy with the game giving a few smoke shells out at random even if a few of the guns never used them. It's a "bug" that benifits neither the AI nor the human player as both sides could easily have a couple of guns that didn't get smoke but now have 2 or 3 shells. It's a very minor issue to me and the existing system is an acceptable abstraction.

chuckfourth said:
I would just point out that if your looking at Heavy Artillery then you may want to have a quick look at rockets as well, as except for nebelwerfer none of these should have smoke capabilty (That I have been able to find anyway. Of course I am willing to look more thouroughly into rockets also.)
Thanks for your time Chuck.

You know we do not assign smoke based on individual weapons so how do we give smoke to nebelwerfer but not Katyusha ? The Heavy arty issue was supposed to be handled by unit class but we think a bit of code that determines warhead size is overriding that but that is still to be determined. It *MIGHT* be possilbe to restict smoke from rockets based on the WH size of the nebelwefer ( and which model gets the smoke? or do all sizes ? )but that means we have to ensure that no other rockets use that particular WH size and the code has be be written with care to ensure it's just that WH size for that class . Then we have to explain this to people who complain that their Katyusha's don't have smoke rockets when their mothers great uncle says they did even though it's not in any reference we can find. This is why I'm quite content with what we have now although I will review just how many smoke rounds are made available to rocket units and **perhaps** reduce them somewhat

Don

[chuckfourth]

Hi Don
Personally Id be happy to lose the nebelwerfers smoke capability if it makes it easier to removed smoke capability from the rockets "class" as a whole. But I guess someone else would complain. Nebelwerfer is a bit odd in this sense as it was developed as a substite for heavy artillery which the germans werent allowed to have according to the treaty of versi, to disguise this "cheating" the weapon was called smoke thrower, Personally I think it was not particularily useful in this role and probably not used as such very often. Reasons being its limited range, inherent inaccuraccy, and massive smoke signature making counterbattery a real problem. For this reason they, like most rocket units are designed to shoot and scoot, which is not what you want if you want your smoke screen to have any sort of persistance. I think it is a much lesser evil for the nebelwerfer to have no smoke issued than the alternative of every rocket unit in the game having AFAIK nonexistent smoke rounds issued.
Best regards Chuck.

[chuckfourth]

Hi PatG
Very excellent work on the trains I must say.
for what its worth from
http://members.tripod.com/~nigelef/fireplan.htm
"Smoke screens, using base ejection (BE) smoke, were used in fire plans, they could be predicted, although a `tester' to confirm the local wind was often used. Screens could be multi or single battery and positioned about 250 yards from the enemy to be blinded. Gun aim-points were placed in a line, with the distance between them depending on the wind direction. If the wind was along the line of the required screen then points were 300 yards apart, if across the line they were 75 yards apart. Whenever smoke was used there were alternative HE targets in case the screen was ineffective. One technique was to create a lane for advancing armour a few hundred yards wide between two screens, these blinded defiladed anti-tank guns, if the wind was favourable these screens could be rolling. Smoke screens could be sustained for long periods, on at least one occasion all day. "
Best Regards Chuck.

[Mobhack]

taking smoke shells away from the nebelwerfers would be rather silly, as that was a primary design goal for the things, as well as gas (most armies that had specialist gas units tended to call them "smoke" units). Even if they ended up as HE chuckers more often than not, the smoke shell was still available.

e.g - lone sentry

The Nebelwerfer 41 can fire three different types of projectiles: high-explosive shells, incendiary projectiles, and smoke projectiles.

The high-explosive shells include those with supersensitive fuzes and those with delayed-action fuzes. The latter can penetrate reinforced cover. Because of their fragmentation and concussion effect, high-explosive shells are used primarily against personnel. It has been found that the concussion has not only been great enough to kill personnel, but occasionally has caused field fortifications and bunkers to collapse.

The incendiary projectiles are psychologically effective, and under favorable conditions can start field and forest fires.

The smoke projectiles are used to form smoke screens or smoke zones.

[This Die Wehrmacht article naturally does not discuss the possible use of gas-charged projectiles.]

Also Lone sentry second article

And finally - I found some reprints of the US Army Intelligence Bulletin at this site - may be of interest
WW" Intelligence Bulletins

Cheers
Andy

[cbo]

chuckfourth said:
Hello
It seems all in-game off map and on-map aritllery can fire smoke. However probably half or more of these guns didnt have a smoke round. As an example look at http://www.tarrif.net/ This site only shows smoke for the German 105mm standard divisional field piece, one of the 150mm guns and the 120mm mortar. Leaving the German 75mm, 77mm, 17cm, 21cm guns and 81mm mortar all without smoke, which they do have in-game.

I dont think you should assume that just because tarrif.net and other webpages does not list a smoke round for a give gun, it couldn't fire or wasn't issued this type of ammunition. Tarrif.net does not list all available ammunition types for each gun, far from it. There were plenty of 75mm smoke shells available for German artillery, even for the 7.5cm PaK, at least when converted to a field artillery piece.

Mortars, even the smaller ones, could fire smoke rounds. The US 81mm certainly had smoke rounds as did the little British 2" weapon. I'd doubt the Germans were any different.

In any case, tarrif.net does list several 75mm smoke rounds for various German guns, including the 7,5cm IG

Claus B

[chuckfourth]

Hi
This is your reminder email. I understand that you are no doubt flooded with work but I would like to point out that you mentioned smoke issued to heavy artillery and rockets (except nebelwerfer) may be removed but unfortuneately this revision didnt appear in the latest patch. Just wondering if it remains on the to do list? Also there is a third clear category that didnt have smoke and does in-game that is naval artillery. Obviously the smoke created by injecting fuel oil into the funnels was about 1000 more times effective than a smoke shell.
I am as always willing to help by identifying the units affected throughout the OOBs or anything else.
Best regards Chuck.