Artillery in Sci-Fi

[SilverDragonRed]

I know artillery as a category is under-represented in sci-fi, but I do have to ask. Is there a setting where self-propelled or towed mortars, or assault guns (self-propelled direct fire) is used?

[Lord Revan]

SW legendaries had SP mortars (on a repulsor platform) and the guns in AOTC would be direct (due to being beams) and Self-propelled.

WH40K also has some form of those as well in the imperial arsenal.

[NecronLord]

Clone Wars also features some SP howitzer equivalents and things. Brian Young recently did a video featuring it.

[Eternal_Freedom]

WH40K also has some form of those as well in the imperial arsenal.

40K has just about every time of artillery imagineable int he Imperial arsenal, from man-portable mortars to tactical nukes and mobile ICBMs.

[NecronLord]

Also some that don't exist in real life, such as mole mortars, exist in 40K.

[Lord Pounder]

In the first Dune book the Harkonnens used artillery to seal the Atreidies soldiers in the caves they retreated to, a tactic unanticipated in a universe with personal shielding that would normally negate most projectile weapons.

[Adam Reynolds]

Clone Wars also features some SP howitzer equivalents and things. Brian Young recently did a video featuring it.

I always found it odd that the SPHA-T heavy turbolaser walker (from ATOC) was never featured in Clone Wars at all. They instead had a hover tank version that could be carried by a cargo gunship. It could be argued that during the war they were found to be too heavy to be used very often.

Though in Downfall of a Droid when Anakin used walkers on an asteroid to outflank Grevious in space, it would have been an ideal time for them. Obviously the real life issue is that the budget didn't have room to animate another vehicle.

Another question from Clone Wars that just came to mind. The defoliator was completely harmless to battle droids but lethal to organics and appeared to be loosely similar to napalm. How does this fit with ROTS in which R2 shoots burning oil inside a pair of SBDs.

Also some that don't exist in real life, such as mole mortars, exist in 40K.

How exactly does that work? I presume that means a tunneling weapon?

[Sea Skimmer]

The mole mortar fires a burrowing projectile directly into the ground which then tunnels under the enemy to explode. Why this is fired at all as opposed to simply being released is completely unexplained. Which might be why it was only in earlier 40K material when the universe was more silly, and in my opinion generally better. 40K has a great diversity of artillery but a great many of the the actual designs leave much to be desired.

The Clone Wars series has more then one contradiction with ROTS as far as that goes. I don't see any real way to resolve it, since the defoliator was far more powerful in effect.

[Starglider]

The mole mortar fires a burrowing projectile directly into the ground which then tunnels under the enemy to explode. Why this is fired at all as opposed to simply being released is completely unexplained. Which might be why it was only in earlier 40K material when the universe was more silly, and in my opinion generally better. 40K has a great diversity of artillery but a great many of the the actual designs leave much to be desired.

If it were actually possible to build a burrowing projectile surely it would make sense to fire it ballistically for most of the range and let it tunnel just the last fifty metres or so, both to reduce time of flight and because burrowing range would likely be short.

[SilverDragonRed]

I should have clarified 'settings outside of Star Wars or 40k' in the OP. Those are the only two I can think of where ground combat is treated as an after-thought.

After talking to a friend about it, it seems that the only type that is seen regularly is fixed position direct firing anti-air artillery. Prominent examples of that being Mass Effect, Flash Gordon movie, or The Forever War.

Clone Wars also features some SP howitzer equivalents and things. Brian Young recently did a video featuring it.

It was that video and this follow up that gave me the idea for this thread. It's good to see he corrected that oversight about AA guns in Flash Gordon.

[Me2005]

I think for most Sci-fi, the artillery role is replaced by space superiority. Halo has 'artillery,' but it's fire raining down from a frigate/carrier instead of a fixed ground position. Your counter batteries are other spacecraft or the anti-space launchers.

[Terralthra]

I think the reason why artillery isn't featured in lots of sci-fi is its prominent role in a lot of serious war movies from World War I, World War II especially, and the Korean and Vietnam wars. Mortars and indirect fire artillery are omnipresent. The whistling noises of incoming, shelling, and so on keep appearing there, and I think it cemented in many viewers an association between indirect fire artillery and "old timey war". Artillery in the future seems anachronistic, like a single-fire laser musket might seem.

[Balrog]

The defoliator I think was more technobabble than simply a really big napalm weapon. Hence why it had no effect on metallic objects. R2 meanwhile sprayed those droids good with oil, which got all up in their innards, so when they were lit they had a better chance of setting off the secondary explosions we see.

[Lord Revan]

I think the reason why artillery isn't featured in lots of sci-fi is its prominent role in a lot of serious war movies from World War I, World War II especially, and the Korean and Vietnam wars. Mortars and indirect fire artillery are omnipresent. The whistling noises of incoming, shelling, and so on keep appearing there, and I think it cemented in many viewers an association between indirect fire artillery and "old timey war". Artillery in the future seems anachronistic, like a single-fire laser musket might seem.

at least in TVs and movies I think the expense of doing artillery is actually more likely, since you need a decent amount of explotions and the related stunt work to make artillery seem imperssive, suspect most would want to use the money elsewhere.

[Elheru Aran]

40K has *plenty* of artillery, all right. It's something like a solid 40% of Forgeworld's catalogue (after Titans, greeblies, and a few bazillion variations of Imperial Guard). Go poke around there if you want a good education... hell, SW has artillery too.

That said, I think most of the examples that I know of have been covered here.

I suspect SF simply likes the colorful pew-pew's. Modern SF may have derived a lot of inspiration from the recent Iraq conflicts, where precision bombing became highly publicized. Artillery is a little more distant and (for lack of a better word) impersonal-- you input a target, fire, and something explodes in the distance (or, to turn it around, you're going about your business and suddenly, explosions). Not as visceral as snapping off colourful bolts towards the head of the dodging enemy soldier.

[Borgholio]

Space : Above and Beyond has armored units, so even though it's never seen, I would presume they would exist in that setting. nBSG weapons are projectile-based so they would need artillery unless they rely on close air support or bombardments for everything. The Matrix is based on our own future and we know we had artillery, they just didn't have any use for it within the confines of Zion. Babylon 5 ground combat is seen with close air support and no armor.

Overall I do think self propelled artillery or large guns are under-represented in sci-fi. I think it could be due to the brain bug that you don't need tanks if you have orbital support or flying gunboats.

[Bedlam]

Babylon 5 ground combat is seen with close air support and no armor.

I'm not 100% sure but I think the episode where the station was host to a group of marines had a short scene where some sort of burning armoured vehicle was seen, that was presumably the B5 version of a tank. Although we didn't really see any heavy ground combat to see what it normally consists of in that world.

[Sea Skimmer]

If it were actually possible to build a burrowing projectile surely it would make sense to fire it ballistically for most of the range and let it tunnel just the last fifty metres or so, both to reduce time of flight and because burrowing range would likely be short.

True very heavy artillery shells in real life can get that deep anyway. Nothing special about them except the long fuse delay. Smaller projectiles can go pretty damn deep too, but would just have the blast muffled by the ground and be ineffective, blowing a camouflet without collapsing anything.

But that isn't how the Mole Mortar worked anyway. It was literally a breach loading mortar that fires directly into the ground in the utter reverse of a normal mortar. And it seems it died off when the Squats got written out of new material. They had a bunch of other heavy siege weapons too, I loved em but not enough GRIMDARK or something. Or just people didn't buy enough overpriced models. If the Mole Mortar worked the way you describe it would have no point, since normal mortars already exist in the universe and could simply fire different ammo as needed.

Overall I do think self propelled artillery or large guns are under-represented in sci-fi. I think it could be due to the brain bug that you don't need tanks if you have orbital support or flying gunboats.

Also I suspect because writers, and all the more so TV shows, want characters bunched up for ease of the reader/viewer and that'd work out really badly if they were being bombarded with concentrated artillery. And having 50% of KIA fall to artillery out of hand isn't heroic enough for typical tastes. Flying gunboats really would reduce the need for indirect fire, but only if you've figured out a way to prevent the enemy flying gunboats from blowing them all up, and reverting the situation to more or less the way it already was with warfare merely having become much more deadly and expensive in the process.

Clone Wars series had some episodes, IIRC the ones with the traitor Jedi, in which the clones were being blasted with fairly effective mortar fire though. The original Clone Wars movie had actual ballistic artillery for the Clones, but its effectiveness was rather lame. Not useless, but kinda like 3in guns from WW1 would have been far more destructive.

[Beowulf]

Hammer's Slammers makes plentiful usage of artillery (even if it doesn't necessarily make an impact). They even have counter artillery weapons (not just counter battery, but counter artillery shell). And, of course, they also make use of tanks.

[Bedlam]

If it were actually possible to build a burrowing projectile surely it would make sense to fire it ballistically for most of the range and let it tunnel just the last fifty metres or so, both to reduce time of flight and because burrowing range would likely be short.

True very heavy artillery shells in real life can get that deep anyway. Nothing special about them except the long fuse delay. Smaller projectiles can go pretty damn deep too, but would just have the blast muffled by the ground and be ineffective, blowing a camouflet without collapsing anything.

But that isn't how the Mole Mortar worked anyway. It was literally a breach loading mortar that fires directly into the ground in the utter reverse of a normal mortar. And it seems it died off when the Squats got written out of new material. They had a bunch of other heavy siege weapons too, I loved em but not enough GRIMDARK or something. Or just people didn't buy enough overpriced models. If the Mole Mortar worked the way you describe it would have no point, since normal mortars already exist in the universe and could simply fire different ammo as needed.

I think it makes a bit more sense as a Squat weapon if most of the fighting is going to be underground, it could be set to attack enemies who are in the tunnels beneath you or half a mile in that way in a more or less parallel tunnel, particularly if it comes with a scanning system to detect enemies through rock.

[InsaneTD]

The mole mortar also makes sense in a setting where where cities have a shield that can protect it from heavy orbital bombardment, has walls made of indestructible material, and yet doesn't have deep foundations.

[Metahive]

The use of artillery in Clone Wars is weird. On one hand that the armies in the Clone Wars follow Napoleonic combat tactics of massed infantry in tight formations should make artillery, especially futuristic artillery a real gamechanger, on the other hand, the existence of portable shield domes should make it completely ineffective at the same time. So what does actually happen? Armies of both sides almost never bring either to the field. In the episode The Zillo Beast the CIS marches their droid army in what can only be called open parade formation towards the entrenched Republicans. They get a nuke (yeah, an EMP bomb, whatever) dropped on them that obliterates the entire army unit in one fell swoop. This is what realistically always should happen should one side decide to go all "stylistic" without any sort of defense (spoiler, it's the only time we get this). In the same battle the Dags use some sort of rail powered artillery but only to fire at the fighters flying above.
It's also not just artillery, CAS and fire support from capital ships is close to non-existent as well. Normally a side that achieved dominance of the space around a planet should have a massive advantage and yet even if the targets on the ground possess no mobile or theater shield no use is made of it at all. The second battle of Geonosis could have gone much smoother for the Republic if they had just taken the time to bombard all the small defensive encampments outside the shielded droid factory from orbit. They didn't, they landed their troops directly in a contested zone without any air assisstence and so suffered heavy casualties.

[Adam Reynolds]

The use of artillery in Clone Wars is weird. On one hand that the armies in the Clone Wars follow Napoleonic combat tactics of massed infantry in tight formations should make artillery, especially futuristic artillery a real gamechanger, on the other hand, the existence of portable shield domes should make it completely ineffective at the same time. So what does actually happen? Armies of both sides almost never bring either to the field. In the episode The Zillo Beast the CIS marches their droid army in what can only be called open parade formation towards the entrenched Republicans. They get a nuke (yeah, an EMP bomb, whatever) dropped on them that obliterates the entire army unit in one fell swoop. This is what realistically always should happen should one side decide to go all "stylistic" without any sort of defense (spoiler, it's the only time we get this). In the same battle the Dags use some sort of rail powered artillery but only to fire at the fighters flying above.

That was an especially stupid case. I forget who said it, but I remember someone making the comment that parades are for after the battle is won, not during it.

Though in fairness in most other cases there seems to be a degree of dispersion by the various forces. Though not nearly as much as modern militaries. Dispersion has actually increased faster than lethality in warfare throughout the centuries(at a rate of 4000 vs 2000). In terms of the average number of men in a single square kilometer of front it has shrunk incredibly quickly. In the ancients it was in numbers of 100,000, by the American Civil War it was 3,883, by WW1 it was 404, by WW2 it was only 36, by the 1973 Arab-Israeli war it was 25 and by the first Gulf War in 1991 it was only 2.

Realistically in the scale of SW we should see even more dispersion of forces, something that almost never happens. Though in fairness, with the overwhelming majority of soldiers in SW wearing high quality body armor, they would have a degree of protection that could negate this problem somewhat. This might also explain the often short ranged nature of SW infantry combat, that at longer ranges blaster bolts became less effective and thus short range was preferable as a means to negate the opposing body armor at least somewhat.

It's also not just artillery, CAS and fire support from capital ships is close to non-existent as well. Normally a side that achieved dominance of the space around a planet should have a massive advantage and yet even if the targets on the ground possess no mobile or theater shield no use is made of it at all. The second battle of Geonosis could have gone much smoother for the Republic if they had just taken the time to bombard all the small defensive encampments outside the shielded droid factory from orbit. They didn't, they landed their troops directly in a contested zone without any air assisstence and so suffered heavy casualties.

I wonder how much this is a brain bug tracing from WW2 movies as opposed to reality. Things like Saving Private Ryan or The Longest Day never showed much in the way of air support or artillery support in the main landings(possibly due to cost). Thus that Geonosis episode, which was clearly based on those films, didn't show it.

What makes this especially odd was that in AOTC, the Clone Army wins primarily because they maintain air supremacy over the battlefield. Though in ROTS this doesn't clearly seem the case, as Kashyyk featured rather intense battles with neither side relying on spacecraft or gaining air superiority. Though in this case it might be because the GAR has space superiority(as indicated by their swift victory over Coruscant) while the CIS has ground superiority caused by their masses of battle droids.* Thus the CIS would be eager to engage the GAR in ground battles that waste serious resources, especially on a species homeworld.

* However with Clone Wars, these positions seem closer to reversed.

[Simon_Jester]

Though in fairness in most other cases there seems to be a degree of dispersion by the various forces. Though not nearly as much as modern militaries. Dispersion has actually increased faster than lethality in warfare throughout the centuries(at a rate of 4000 vs 2000). In terms of the average number of men in a single square kilometer of front it has shrunk incredibly quickly. In the ancients it was in numbers of 100,000, by the American Civil War it was 3,883, by WW1 it was 404, by WW2 it was only 36, by the 1973 Arab-Israeli war it was 25 and by the first Gulf War in 1991 it was only 2.

Realistically in the scale of SW we should see even more dispersion of forces...

The biggest problem with that is that most of their really effective weapons seem to be line of sight, and with line of sight weapons there's a minimum ratio of manpower to space imposed by the need for individual units to support each other.

In the Gulf War there may only have been two soldiers per square kilometer of the theater of operations... but that is because the theater of operations got large, not because the armies got small. At any one time where the two sides were actually in combat, locally the ratio of manpower to space was much higher.

By comparison, those figures of ~3800 men per square kilometer of front you're getting for the American Civil War refer only to pitched battles fought between two armies that had more or less both agreed to meet and fight at a specific point. The equivalent in 20th century war would be something like the Somme battlefield in 1916 or Stalingrad... and I'm pretty sure the average was higher than 40 to 400 men per square kilometer on those battlefields.

[Sky Captain]

In Sci Fi universes where winner or looser is decided in space battle there is not much need for artillery type weapons. If enemy has destroyed anti space defenses and achieved space superiority then no amount of artillery is going to change that. Any obvious large concentrations of ground forces would quickly be destroyed by orbital bombardment. Best way to resist occupation may be insurgent style tactics using small highly mobile and dispersed forces. Basically make yourself enough PITA so the enemy decides that occupation is not worth the trouble.