Why?I understand that man carried mortars are useful but why motorise them?What benefit do they bring over artillery which is supposed to be motorised
>>64994916>whyStart by listing the defining characteristics that distinguish mortars from howitzers, anon
When you want fire support but don't want to drop 155mm on something.
>>64994916Shoot and scoot still applies to mortars. Its also nice to be able to scoot with ammo.
It's a JDAM for mortars.
>>64994916Can't do MRSI with a basic bitch tube and base plate mortar
>>64994927/thread
>>64994925>>64994927>>64994945Isn't it useless with today's variety in artillery ammo
>>64994977• Mortars are much lighter and much smaller for same load. They have a higher load percentage because fin stabilization and lower pressure greatly lowers the required shell strength.•Recoil is easy to deal with.•You can transport them more easily, go over bad roads/terrain more easily, everything in terms of transport and logistics is easier. They're cheaper too.•They can do super high parabolic trajectories with near-vertical landing, without requiring anything super expensive. That can be very useful even with shorter range.It's true that after WW2 motorized heavy mortars that used to be quite popular started dying off, I don't know if much of anything lasted even into Vietnam (didn't the bongs have a 4.2" that got some action in Korea?). But with modern precision guidance and an increasing recognition that sheer quantity and logistics may matter again I can see the argument to experiment with bringing something back. If the price and production numbers were right I could see it being handy in a number of contexts, an unexciting but quite practical infantry support thing. Rheinmetall describes it as unusually straight forward, something quite mechanically simple with fast rate of fire, 18 rounds per minute, 8km range, stick on any vehicle, interface with a ton of ballistic computers or fire control or whatever else, stop, deploy, pump out a half dozen 120mm rounds accurately at whatever is needed, then pack up and go near immediately after the last round is off. If it works well looks like it'd be worth trying in Ukraine.
launching a zillion mortars is a great way to circumvent cluster munition bans
>>64995024>circumvent cluster munition bansAnon, those aren't some legal moralfag thing they're about self interest, so no mortars have nothing to do with that. If a country truly has its back against the wall then they'll just use cluster munitions if they think it'll be militarily helpful, see Ukraine. Europe would too. But nobody WANTS to have farmers hitting UXOs with plows on their own land for the next century either if it can be avoided, and it doesn't matter whether it's spammed mortar rounds or cluster ones or anything else. So they'll still try to stick to a "ban" if it's possible to do so too because the enemy aren't subhuman.
>>64994916there were like, dozens of motorized mortars in ww1/ww2. kinda interesting both that they vanished and if they return again
>>64995024>cluster munition bansare more voluntary than most international laws, because they lack the universality of the Geneva Conventions
>>64994916This is obviously a totally useless system with zero survivability in any conflict.The range is far too short to not get spotted and hit by drones loitering on the front line.
>>64998011That's why I'm asking why do they build this instead of more SPGs
>>64998011>The range is far too short to not get spotted and hit by drones loitering on the front line.>IFVs and APCs are useless guiz cuz range is far too short to not get spotted and hit by drones everyone should use wheelbarrows and donkeys like the russians do not vehicles>actually we don't need infantry either because they have even less range
>>64998031Yes, infantry and their related support equipment is obsolete in 2026.All that is required is drones on every level.And counter drones.And counter counter dronesAnd counter counter counter drones.And carrier vehicles to get them places economically.Which this could do. This could carry a drone swarm and release it. Then it would actually be effective.Until the counter counter counter counter drones show up.
>>64994916>why>why motorize them (same question repeated two times)Huge amount of ammo and ability to fire faster. More importantly, the ability to shoot and scoot before you get counter-battery on your position.>What benefit do they bring over artillery which is supposed to be motorisedCheaper, closer to front line, faster response times.>>64994927>>64994956This.>>64998011Drones get jammed and can't bring the same firepower / rof at cost.
>>64994927>Its also nice to be able to scoot with ammo.It's probably also appreciated by mortar crew that they can operate their mortar from the comfy climate-controlled cabin of an vehicle with enough armor protect them from the majority of counter-battery fire.Sure, it won't survive a direct hit from a 152mm shell, but it'll stop incoming shrapnel from shells impacting near the vehicle.
>>64998046And then we end up with that Star Trek episode where you get a phone call that the computer says you've been bombed, please report to your nearest termination office.
>>64998242>Drones get jammedModern ones with neural net optical targeting are extremely hard to jam.
>>65001562Is it running the neural net locally? That's a lot of compute for an FPV, isn't it?
>>65001640Obviously it wouldn't be an FPV if it was autonomous. He's talking about advanced loitering munitions like Switchblade 600.
>>64995024>launching a zillion mortarsimagine the sound
>>64995012This. A 120mm mortar has about the same amount of HE as a 155mm shell. It lacks the range, of course, which is possibly an issue with drones (although there are ways to deal with that, and being mobile helps). And it has many of the same options as 155s, including GPS-guided (PGMM, Iron String), cargo rounds (insert bomblets, drones, whatever you like here), etc.Also, 120s are heavy. They're not really man-pack; they've almost always been towed or self-propelled. So, this isn't really anything new. Plus, while it doesn't have an autoloader, the MWS 120 *does* have electric motors for laying, so it's at least theoretically possible to do MRSI (or at least get pretty close) with it.
looks similar to patria tremos?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD_Xg1Qv1hc
>>65001640>Is it running the neural net locally? That's a lot of compute for an FPV, isn't it?Not really, such drones flew first in ukraine in combat years ago already.They use nvidia jetsons and the like, 300 euros.The network required for image recognition is vastly more compact than LLMs and such.I have toyed around with facial recognition networks running on an ESP32 which is merely a 2x240mhz dualcore extensa with 8MB PSRAM. There's youtube videos of such demos.For a couple 100 euros worth of compute you can run a very sophisticated neural net, plenty good to target humans, tanks, vehicles.The way it works is you geofence it and use inertial guidance to roughly determine if you're in the target area, ofc cheap inertial has huge drift, but that is good enough to determine if you're away from friendlies or not.Then you turn on the neural net. Ofc that sucks battery like a 5th motor, but you only need to turn it on once you're in terminal guidance, sort of.The advantages are huge, no need for a radio link, no need for sat com, that can all be jammed and your drone still works.It is frankly the future of munitions targeting. The chinese managed to get radar prices real low, they now put small AESA SAR on everything, that's real scary.That's easier to detect and jam than a camera on a drone, for that you need accurate laser tracking to blind it and something to find it in the first place.Anti-laser measures could be simple mechanical filter array, try some until you find a frequency the laser doesn't work on. The neural net can be quite agnostic about the spectrum it works on, lasers are extremely narrow band.
>>65001716First thing that came to my mind.
>>65001640he is just spamming flavor of the month techbro buzzwords he heard on the net. fiber optic wires are real though and counter EW. Upside is that their weight takes away from payload capacity which means less boom boom carried around
>>64994977No, because mortars are still lighter and thus can be mounted on lighter platforms.
>>64994916>What benefit do they bring over artillery which is supposed to be motorisedMaybe they just fancy the idea of shooting while moving, like drive-by mortar volleys.Regardless of how impractical this would turn out on the modern battlefield, you can't deny your inner engineer would have an absolute throbber thinking of ways to design a ground CCRP of sorts where the tube trajectories would self-adjust to the pre-programmed/live spotter drone fed GPS location of your targets as you move.And say you'd turn on this auto-FDC once you know you're about to go in a straight heading and speed for a couple of seconds, just for better predictability, and it just PLOP!-PLOP!-PLOP!s some 120s at just the right time and your target is at the overlap of these (minimum) three shrapnel splatter diameters HHNNGGG
