Palindrome wrote:
WHy wouldn;t artillery special rules be in Easter Front? It does cover the early/mid part of the Continuation war and Finnish artillery had been reformed and was much better supplied than it was in the Winter war so it was a lot more effective. The intercepted communications rule is a little silly though.
The intercepted communications it should include (as since winterwar, allmost every time when possible, the soviet formation areas were caught in artillery barrages due to the poor com protection used by soviets, so the finnish counter intelligence was well aware the time and place of such happenings - thou the rule itself is bit silly, should work more like preliminary bombardment), but as far as I know, the new
FO-battery on-call system (modelled under "Automated Fire Control") wasnt ready for combat until 1944 (as the troop re-training did take some time), although it was accepted in service in 1943, 11th of july.
And
IMO how the book presents it, its a bit silly. After all, the point should be that with whe dedicated "computers", the single gun was able to change target in less than 5minutes and be bombarding allready. Even nowadays, thats quite fast for manual. And due to the new
FO-mechanic, the
FO didnt need to know where the batteries were (and even for the guns, it was enough to know in which direction he was "leading" and the target coordinates), so in theory, they were able to call in fire mission, and any battery on call could answear. Or even all of them! As an example, during the battle of tali-ihantala, in one occasion, more than 21 batteries (around 250 gus) were in call of a single
FO-party! According to my former XO, no other army of that era was capapble of doing that, and the "Nenosen systeemi" (according to creator, System of Nenonen) was well guarded seacret till the end of a war.
But why the rule is stupid? Cos all guns did have calculator-NCO. In theory, even a single gun could have fired fire mission, so its stupid to require staff team to be able to join in the fire mission.
So the rule is kinda half-okay, but you should be able to call-in fire from even such batteries without staff team. And for notice, the system should apply to mortar units too.