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.
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?"
> 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?"
Raw performance is efficiency. You must consider space efficiency, CPU efficiency, network efficiency, time efficiency, developer efficiency, etc
Efficiency is analogous to velocity, with gains analogous to distance. Highly efficient developers must still travel non-trivial distances to achieve performance gains, and therein lies the core of my epiphany, that performance is not efficiency, and highly efficient developers must spend non-trivial amounts of time to achieve performance gains that may in fact undermine development velocity, CPU efficiency per task, architectural efficiency (DRY), time efficiency (latency), etc...
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.
It seems that from that it really wasn't the American's accuracy that enabled their simultaneous fire, but rather the American's understanding how important coordination was with artillery and starting from just after WWI working on making that a reality.
Yes, Unity of Command is one of the best light wargames ever created. It's all about supply; balancing the need to advance quickly to capture the objectives within the uber-optimistic schedules vs needing to protect your supply vs. not wanting to outrun your logistics vs. trying to surround enemies and easily eliminate them when they're inefficient and out of supply.
The AI is excellent especially when playing the defense (which is nice, since for the human playing the attacker is the more interesting role). It's great at noticing when the player has overreached and mercilessly punishing those mistakes.
I can't recommend it highly enough if you have any interest at all in wargames. It works as an entry level game, but is also deeply satisfying for the grognards.
If a bit of self promotion is allowed, check out https://github.com/spring1944/spring1944. It's an RTS, so a little more action oriented than the (typically) more detailed turn based wargames, and a bit larger scale than something like company of heroes, but hopefully fun.
Players tend to be around in the evening GMT. Contributions weclome, either in player-hours or pull requests -- hacking in Lua, primarily, with some supporting tools/infra in perl and python.
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.
During the Vietnam conflict, the cost of killing an enemy with iron bombs dropped by planes got very expensive too.
Due to lacking quality (not guided munitions), quantity was the path taken to make up for it. This increased # of sorties needed dramatically, increase chance of getting shot down in process, worn out planes faster, etc etc, translating into a very high cost.
Pretty sure escalibur shells and hellfires are more cost effective, strangely.
A lot of that cost was due to the Air Force being grossly incompetent, resulting in needless losses.
On the other hand, in the early '70s when we and South Vietnam stomped a 150,000 man armored invasion, in the Air Force part of Linebacker (I, not II later with B-52s), smart bombs were used almost exclusively to devastating effect, as I remember hearing about at the time. But the Air Force was still all but giving the Northern Air Force free shots at their planes....
I disagree about needless losses. Hitting a bridge with dumb bombs is extremely hard, let alone actually destroying it. With unguided bombs, they just had to drop enough of them and hope law of chances work in their favor. Stomping on a 150,000 army doesn't require much accuracy on the other hand, especially compared to dropping a bridge.
It was always that way with bombing from planes, until guided bombs/missiles came out.
Using a WWII era formation in the jet age. This alone reduced their air combat power to 1/4th of the Navy's, and exacerbating the manpower problem. In general a tremendous amount of institutional butthurt from being forced to use Navy planes and missiles appears to have prevented them from updating their tactics and otherwise following the Navy.
Dependence on their own ineffective missiles such as the AIM-4 Falcon (only in theory useful for knocking out big bombers) and their own versions of the Navy's Sidewinder.
Totally inadequate training, especially for replacement pilots as they rotated the first set out. The Navy was "lucky" that the single most difficult thing you can do in an airplane is generally considered to be landing on a carrier so they couldn't drop standards, but they also e.g. set up the Top Gun school.
Inability to learn, to for example realize the above meant their pilots were firing their missiles out of envelope too much. Or that their rough handing of missiles prior to putting them on planes resulted in many more of them failing. Not (hardly as much) a problem with the Navy.
Unlike the Navy, they were unable to provide good real time guidance to their pilots (when close to the shore, their pilots could benefit from the Navy's assets). They also found it difficult to impossible to put together a working system to get real time warnings to pilots from intercepted North Vietnamese transmissions.
Those are just the big ones off the top of my head, air combat focused, there's lots more.
As for the 150,000 man Army, what they most critically did with smart bombs plus massively better constraints (or lack thereof) from the White House (LBJ -> Nixon) was to destroy the logistics supporting it. Yeah, air strikes further south were very nasty, but without fuel etc. a mechanized army withers on the vine and is less able to deal with close in threats ... e.g. easier to hit an armored vehicle if it's run out of fuel....
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."
It appears to have been originally posted in June 2000. The internet was still quite a ways from the "all human knowledge within five clicks" state that we take for granted today, along with the assumption that any reasonable statement should be immediately supportable with links.
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.
The US Civil War shaped American military doctrine regarding the use of firepower about 50 years before the major European combatants began to develop their own doctrines in The Great War. Both Union and Confederacy were moving troops and equipment by rail in the 1860's it was a very modern war in terms of mechanization of logistics as well.
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.)
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.
Elevation was corrected for by the Americans. They used the British system, but had massive artillery correction tables printed into books based on the myriad of factors.
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.
I did a little digging, as I'm a huge WWII nerd after reading this article, and it does seem like the Eniac was used to generate artillery tables, but it's not clear if those were the same as used by the centralized firing control.
The chief factor seems to have been an American reorganization of artillery in the 20s and 30s, chiefly intended to support centralization of battery fire at a battalion level.
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.