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Hi everyone,

Can you fire from within a transport. For example... can I fire my Mortar within my Bren carrier? Its a Mortar Platoon in Bren carriers. The same with my Vickers Platoon.

Cheers Luke

Some you can for example some german Motorised units can fight from their 251's in some cases and fire from them. But it is usually a special rule. E.g. mentioned in the army list or the Book.

If you mean my Platoon has a 3" Mortar can we fire it from a transport, then No.

But remember you can get specialist transport vehicles that have that weapon fitted, like a Skdf 251 with an 8cm Mortar, then Yes.

The answer is a.....Depends. I haven't got a British Book covering Brens sorry.

As mentioned, there are a handful of vehicles that allow firing from inside. For instance, US halftracks had firing mounts along the sides for machine guns. So the LMG teams in a US Armored Rifle Platoon can mount their LMGs up while inside a halftrack and fire from there. Of course, they're treated as vehicle-mounted MGs (ROF 3 instead of the usual 5(?), and range 16" instead of the usual 24"), and it's treated as the halftrack firing. So if you're firing the passenger-fired MG that it carries at the same time then the LMGs have ROF 1. And the LMGs are mounted on opposite sides of the halftrack, so they have opposite 180 degree firing arcs.

So yeah, it's an option. But it's not nearly as useful as it is in 40K. Of course, there's also the problem that transports in FoW tend to be very fragile. And you need to be very careful about maneuvering them into locations where they can shoot. After all, the people that they're shooting at can usually shoot right back...

Or as the American troops supposedly claimed, halftrack walls are just thin enough to let a bullet through, and just thick enough to keep it from going out the other side...


Some of the transports in the game also have "passenger-fired" weapons. But they're set up in a fashion that keeps the driver from firing them, so you need to have passengers in the vehicle in order to use them. Some of the German halftracks are unusual in that they have a machine gun that can be operated by the driver, and a second machine gun that's passenger-fired only.



One final thing to keep in mind. In World War 2, accurately firing from a moving vehicle was effectively impossible. Machine guns depend more on bullet saturation than accuracy, so it wasn't a big issue for them. But for pretty much any other vehicle, you had to stop the vehicle first in order to fire. For vehicles like transports, it was generally easier to just kick the gun crew out so that they could set up the gun, as opposed to creating a special firing space so that the gun crew could fire the weapon without leaving the vehicle. In fact, the US Mortar Jeep (which can be found in the US Armored Cavalry units) handwaves this. The jeep's mortar is treated as any other vehicle weapon, but my understanding is that the mortar was basically kept stowed in the back of the jeep until the crew decided to fire. Then they'd stop the vehicle, hop out with the mortar, fire off a few rounds, and jump back into the jeep. There are vehicles that are essentially halftracks with weapons for both the US and German armies, but in all cases they are effectively dedicated vehicle conversions that can't be used as transports within the game. A good example is the US M4 Mortar Carrier (not to be confused with the M4 Medium Tank - aka Sherman) that's basically a halftrack carrying a mortar team. Between the mortar itself, the crew needed to operate the weapon, the space needed to safely fire the weapon, and the ammunition, there's not much transport space left. So it wasn't used to carry spare troops, and in the game isn't treated as a transport.