Artillery

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by cmdicely

The Fire Direction Center clearly does something (which is why using vs. not using one gives a familiarity difference in use of the Artillery skill), but its not clear what the people in the FDC would be doing in GURPS terms, since the rules push everything off on the FO and Gunner. Given that, I think we need to assume that the RAW presume that the FDC succeeds at whatever its task is,

Realistically that's a huge assumption. IME in RL errors by the FDC have the most critical effect on the outcome of the Fire Mission by any of the three elements.

which probably involves a roll against the (notional) Fire Direction/TL skill, which probably has the same specialties as Artillery and similar familiarity issues between weapons, and certainly equipment quality modifiers.

Such a skill existed in 3e. It should get bonuses from Mathematical ability and default to Mathematics, Cartography and Forward Observer.

If the FDC succeeds, everything works as in the RAW; if the FDC fails that should penalize the gunnery roll (or, perhaps more realistically, displace the point that will be struck by a success on the gunnery roll.) Critical failure by the FDC has effects similar to a critical failure by the FO in the rules in High Tech, but, conversely, a success by the FDC will detect a critical failure by the FO before anyone fires -- it won't correct it, it will just let the FO try again before anyone gets killed. (I'm presuming here that one thing the FDC will have is information on the location and disposition of friendly units in their area of responsibility; that seems logical to me, but I don't know enough about real-world artillery operations to know that that is the case.)

Yes that's all quite accurate actually.

Originally Posted by Xplo

Seems to me that giving everyone involved a significant skill (meaning that at some point they need to roll against it) would bloat the number of rolls needed - no one, or almost no one, wants to make half a dozen rolls to see if they can put a mortar on target - and artificially inflate the chance of failure.

It seems reasonable if you treat the mortar as an off map asset, and you are playing the supported unit or FO, but what if the PCs are in the firing unit? They receive a call for fire, a random period of time passes and one character makes a roll for all of them? Furthermore there are three elements to indirect fire, and the rules only account for two of them. If any of the three make an error it affects the entire mission. The FDC is unique in that they are capable of correcting errors from both the other two elements, whereas the other two can both catch errors of the FDC.

I would want to look at how many of these people perform tasks that both require and benefit from training, experience, and/or natural talent.

The FDC is considered to be a more difficult and senior set of billets to the gun crews. It requires a skill set that is difficult to master and at least in my experience (although perhaps other weapons and/or militaries are different) of mortars one is first trained as a mortarman and then selected for the FDC.

Is FDC a difficult role, or is it just punching some numbers into a computer?

It is probably one of the only jobs left where "Computer" is a person and not a device. Much of the calculations are done by hand, and even when a ballistic computer is used the interfaces (at least at TL8) aren't simple. Additionally there are many decisions involved that non-sapient computers couldn't make easily.

Under what circumstances would the task be intrinsically easier or harder?

The usual: time, weather, equipment, extremely complicated fire requests.

If you blew a skill roll, what would happen?

The round(s) could be theoretically as much as 10k off.

Why does mortar fire require two different types of gunners? Do they both benefit from high skill, or does one of them just perform routine tasks? Etc.

(Note: I'm only going to discuss the two man method here) The A-Gunner puts the gun data on the sight, while the Gunner manipulates the Mortar to get it roughly on target, then the A-Gunner adjusts the bipods while the Gunner looks through the sight. If either of them makes a mistake and the Squad Leader fails to catch it, the rounds will be off target.