Realistic Artillery Management - FOO Rule

[RERomine]

1. adjust the fire - if he does this he must adjust ALL targeted guns into the new hex.

No FOO in any army can determine from a shoot which individual gun is firing errant. Indeed in real life if a gun is way off target like what happens in SP (I just had two 3" mortars firing at the same hex land about 500 yards apart, shoot the mortar commander on that one) the entire battery is taken off line until they can work out which gun is errant and correct it. They do this by having each individual gun fire onto the target one at a time, observing fall of shot. It is too dangerous for the grunts on the ground to have a gun firing short or wide

I'll parrot in on this since I was involved in the discussion over at Shrapnel. I'm going with the assumption the objective is to achieve as much reality as possible. If I'm off base, please forgive this misguided soul

Technically speaking, by adjusting all guns to the original target, you are effectively saying you CAN identify which guns are off. The SP artillery model allows rounds of a given battery to be more widely dispersed than in reality. Assuming all guns are set up properly, have similar tube wear, firing rounds from the same lot, fire from reasonable proximity to each other, under the same weather conditions, etc., they should be able to all put their rounds in the same hex if that is the intent. They might all be in the WRONG hex, but they should be together. The SP artillery model doesn't allow this to happen. That is a "gamey" aspect you aren't going to get rid of.

With respect to the artillery sheafs suggested by Cross, that is reality. Artillery would only be concentrated (converged sheaf) in one spot against hard targets. In game terms, a platoon of infantry in the open represents four separate targets, while in reality they are just "infantry in the open". If those infantry squads are advancing 100m apart, why would you target one? If the FOO has eyes on, it's possible all rounds could land on target, effecting only the one squad. What you want in this case is an open sheaf where the blast radius of rounds from one gun reaches, but doesn't overlap, the blast radius of the next gun and so on. This would impact the entire platoon and is a reality.

Seems to me it's not to hard to simulate and still keep to the spirit of what you are trying to accomplish with the "FOO Rule". It goes with the single premise you can tell what the original target was in the first place. That's fairly easy to do, as long as fire isn't directed at the edge of the map. The map centers on the target, whether the rounds actually hit them or not. Based on that, it would be possible to allow sheafs suggested by Cross, if you ignore the "gamey" paradox. In this case the paradox being, you have to adjust all guns because you can't tell which one is off, but to adjust them, you need to be able to do just that.

Just define what sheafs you want. Make the rule that all targeted hexes from a single battery be under control of a single FOO and have to be adjacent to one other target from the battery or within two hexes, what have you. I figure if you can verify all guns from a battery target the same hex, you can also verify they are being fired in an acceptable, agreed upon, sheaf.

Another aspect of artillery that should be considered is the "walking" or "creaping" barrage. As the rules are now, the target is the hex and not what was in the hex. If infantry is hit by artillery, they are going to move. You shouldn't have to cancel the existing mission just to adjust the fire 100m because the infantry insisted on leaving the impact zone. Again, that's not realistic. The FOO would not really start the whole process over again from scratch.

While I'm typing, has any discussion be fronted on keeping artillery units together? Seems to me that goes hand in hand with the FOO rule. Some folks widely separate their guns to avoid counter battery fire. This effectively means a four gun battery would have to come up with four very different firing solutions to engage one hex. I thought I would just toss that out there :)