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Note that I'm willing to sacrifice the LR weapons on the altar of gun-howitzers, so the 105mm cannon is looked with even lower enthusiasm.Germans had 4-6 different 10.5cm howitzers with longer barrels (or at least longer range) than the standard le FH 18.
I am not sure where the crossover point is. They got one to have a range of 15km.
But you have the 10.5cm K 18 cannon with a range of 19.075km.
Problem is that they started to gain weight fairly fast although not so bad as the 10.5cm K 18.
The Prototype 10.5cm le K 41 did range to the 15km but it weighed 2640kg instead of 1985kg for the 'standard' Howitzer. Granted this is about 1/2 the weight of the 10.5cm K 18.
Germans thought it was too much gun for the shell weight.
Germans got another 1.65km out of the standard howitzer by using a special shell, a special charge and a muzzle brake.
I'm loathe to use the 5-6 ton towed guns as AT guns, apart the need of self defense.There are real problems with trying to use large heavy artillery pieces as AT guns. The 10.5cm K 18 fired a 15.56kg AP shell at 827mps which is sufficient to take out just about anybody's tank. Problems include you now have your divisional (or Corp) artillery on the front line and can be taken out by machine gun fire or 81-82mm mortars.
They are useless for using as general support artillery because the first round fired revels the position to any enemy within several km.
With the weight of the barrels they tend to track moving targets both slowly and they tend to overrun the target when the target stops.
Agreed.With artillery the weapon is the shell. The gun is just the launcher. Much like bomber aircraft, the weapon is the bomb/s. The bomber aircraft is just the deliver system.
The German 10.5 cannon used the same carriage as the 15cm how so they saved a bit of money there. It might have been a bit heavy but tailoring a specific carriage for it might have been a bit much.Note that I'm willing to sacrifice the LR weapons on the altar of gun-howitzers, so the 105mm cannon is looked with even lower enthusiasm.
Yes, once AT guns went beyond 2 tons things got more than a little weird. Germans had mixed feelings about the 1.5ton 7.5cm PAK 40. It did the job, but it was hard to move.I'm loathe to use the 5-6 ton towed guns as AT guns, apart the need of self defense.
This comes to the point of the matter. The British 25pdr (88mm) used a 20lb AP shot (solid) at about 610m/s. The gun weighed just under 4000lbs (2 short tons) and it was a crappy AT gun.The 88mm gun-how firing the AP shot at close to 700 m/s will deal with anything, bar later Churchill, KV and IS tanks anyway
Germans are between a rock and a hard place. They ran out of the materials for HVAP shot part way through the war. In fact the Americans were running low. M4 75mm Shermans were very seldom issued HVAP ammo because they thought the Tungsten carbide cores would be better used in the 3in/76mm guns and for a lot of 1944 these longer barreled weapons often had 2-4 rounds at a time. The 75mm gun tanks rarely saw any.HVAP shots can help out from 1941 on. The 105mm gun-how should improve the game further, ditto for the 127-128mm gun-how.
Yes, once AT guns went beyond 2 tons things got more than a little weird. Germans had mixed feelings about the 1.5ton 7.5cm PAK 40. It did the job, but it was hard to move.
They stopped that by 1915. May depend of definition of front line. By 1915 (and early 1915) the guns were out of sight of what they were shooting at. The guns were behind buildings, woods, ridges, or in deep pits. Sound location was being used and so was flash at night. The problem was communication. Signal flags did not cut it. telegraph/telephone was used. Carrier pigeons were used for back up when the wires were cut.But during WWII? If most of your artillery shooting is done by firing at targets basically on the front line,
British may have come up this first? Or at least in parallel.The US is generally lauded as having the most efficient targeting system during WWII, able to rapidly shoot with multiple batteries within range, including time of arrival shooting capability. The last one is pretty useful, as after the first shell hits everybody jumps into cover and the efficiency of subsequent shells is greatly diminished. No reason why the Germans couldn't develop a system like this, and crucially it doesn't require massive extra amounts of steel production either.
They stopped that by 1915. May depend of definition of front line. By 1915 (and early 1915) the guns were out of sight of what they were shooting at. The guns were behind buildings, woods, ridges, or in deep pits.