Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!bionet!ames!amdahl!amdcad!military From: davecb@nexus.yorku.ca (David Collier-Brown) Newsgroups: sci.military Subject: Re: Mortars & Tanks (and tracers) Message-ID: <27130@amdcad.AMD.COM> Date: 6 Sep 89 10:50:58 GMT References: <8033@cbnews.ATT.COM> <8129@cbnews.ATT.COM> <8273@cbnews.ATT.COM> Sender: cdr@amdcad.AMD.COM Organization: York U. Computing Services Lines: 42 Approved: military@amdcad.amd.com From: davecb@nexus.yorku.ca (David Collier-Brown) Mike Schmitt probably writes: | Personally, I wouldn't engage tanks with mortars - it might make them | very angry at me. But, if all I had to engage tanks with were mortars, | I shouldn't be there in the first place. :-) :-) Once upon a time, I was a lowly lance-corporal in the canajan farces, being taught about the 60mm mortar. The instructor commented that they were also used as a flat-trajectory weapon mounted in the turret of a then-current british scout car.... When we got to the range to actually fire the little creature at a very dead ex-tank, it became obvious that at the short ranges we were firing at (150-250m) it was "too easy" to hit the tank using vertical trajectory. So we asked the instructor if we could try firing flat trajectory. After being **real** sure we had the spade base well dug in, he handed us three bombs with all the boosters still attached, and told us to try and hit the tracks. After bouncing several rounds across the ground (!) and making dust clouds in front of the tank, we got the third bomb to fly all the way to the tracks... and watched the track split. We had a very productive afternoon of blowing the tracks up: about two out of three people could break a link within three bombs. Of course, we were shooting at the **side** of the tank, not the front of the track. Tactically, this amounted to disabling a tank that was either right on your lines or just inside them: a serious annoyance to the people that the tank was parked amoung. Not to mention that they probably wouldn't like their own troops firing mortars three feet over their heads! --dave ps: the 60 mm is fired by pushing a little lever on the side, not merely dropping a bomb down the barrel. Presumably the scout-car version had some sort of breech-loading scheme as well. -- David Collier-Brown, | davecb@yunexus, ...!yunexus!davecb or 72 Abitibi Ave., | {toronto area...}lethe!dave Willowdale, Ontario, | Joyce C-B: CANADA. 223-8968 | He's so smart he's dumb.