Magical armour for 18th century warfare, practicality and uses questions.

[Jub]

There are a few advantages ACW and napoleonic artillery has compared to WW1 artillery in this case--well, one advantage--and that is that it's closer to the front compared to later artillery. The majority of artillery during the first world war--not all of it mind--was farther back from the front line compared to earlier artillery.

And yes, it is hard to knock down barbed wire; the best you can hope for against the wire directly is to knock down the posts holding it up. Though A much better tactic in my mind is to aim the artillery right at the area where the barbed wire ends and blast out some craters for infantry to crawl into and cut the wire from relative safety.

Again it isn't as if WW1 artillery couldn't have been moved forward if accuracy was the only issue keeping the wire from being damaged by barrages. Instead the issue is that wooden posts and metal wire simply take an artillery pounding too well for such methods of wire clearing to work. Tanks aside, there was no truly good way to deal with wire in WW1.

The issue is that the ends of each set of wire are your kill zones. This is where your fastest shooters and quick firing guns will be set to kill the men the wire funnels to you. So crater or not, the men set to cut the wire will be in extreme danger just as they would have been in WW1.

[Steelinghades]

The issue is that the ends of each set of wire are your kill zones. This is where your fastest shooters and quick firing guns will be set to kill the men the wire funnels to you. So crater or not, the men set to cut the wire will be in extreme danger just as they would have been in WW1.

Not quite as much danger as WW1--the lack of machine guns sees to that--but danger none the less.

[Jub]

Not quite as much danger as WW1--the lack of machine guns sees to that--but danger none the less.

At the same time, the men cutting the wire also lack things like communication back to their own lines via trench phones, modern grenades, covering fire from true sniper rifles, and other things that 100 years of technical advantage would have given them. In the end, I think that this armor creates situations that favor the defender and thus warfare gets to be a defensive meatgrinder much like WW1 was.

[Sea Skimmer]

And yes, it is hard to knock down barbed wire; the best you can hope for against the wire directly is to knock down the posts holding it up. Though A much better tactic in my mind is to aim the artillery right at the area where the barbed wire ends and blast out some craters for infantry to crawl into and cut the wire from relative safety.

No wire cutting shellfire worked by cutting the wire directly. The posts were generally metal pickets and relatively resistant to shrapnel and explosions of small caliber shells, the wire was not and only a matter of probability to hit (loose wire is harder to damage then taught wire though). Nor would knocking posts down remove the barrier, far too much wire was used. Same with craters, you would need a very high caliber weapon to create a crater larger then the 25 yard width of typical WW1 style entanglements; the people building them knew what they were doing on that.

150-200 rounds of 75mm class shellfire is what it took to breach such a barrier, with the beach that would result being about 25 yards wide. Accuracy precluded making narrower cuts, and if you wanted gaps larger then 25 yards the usual result was the entire destruction of the wire belt.

That certainly consumed a lot of ammunition but by 1917 nothing was stopping it from happening; the Germans actually began to give up on large barbed wire belts even before the tank became commonplace because the allies simply DID have the shells to fire to breach them.

But as far as lesser bare entanglements go or those on a lower tech basis, they can just be breached by pole charges aka bangalore torpedoes. Such methods work well against any ONE belt of wire. The problem in WW1 was that enormous amounts of time and effort went into making multiple belts. But literally the stuff would rust, this was a very large commitment of resources for the Germans to deploy and maintain. Thus the reason why it faded out late war. Massive amounts of wire are in direct competition with gun and ammo production, and digging trenches and by 1917, anti tank ditches. On any tech basis factors like this will come into play. ON a low tech base without huge blast furnances to make steel by the millions of tons barbed wire isn't really that big a deal. Better armor would be every bit a boon to attackers in an era of slow firing weapons.