Canister shot or case shot is a kind of anti-personnel ammunition used in cannons. It was similar to case and the naval grapeshot, but fired smaller and more numerous balls, which did not have to punch through the wooden hull of a ship. Canister shot has been used since the advent of gunpowder-firing artillery in Western armies; the canister round is similar to a case and is still used today in modern artillery in the main armament of tanks with smoothbore cannons. Canister shot consists of a closed metal cylinder filled with round lead or iron balls packed with sawdust to add more solidity and cohesion to the mass and to prevent the balls from crowding each other when the round was fired. At times when the supply of balls was limited, scrap iron or lead and other similar metal objects were included; the canister itself was made of tin dipped in a lacquer of beeswax diluted with turpentine to prevent corrosion of the metal. Iron was substituted for tin for larger-calibre guns; the ends of the canister were closed with wooden or metal disks.
Attached to the back of the metal canister was a cloth cartridge bag, which contained the round's gunpowder charge, used to fire the canister from the gun barrel. A sabot of wood, metal, or similar material was used to help guide the round during firing from the cannon. Case shot is a similar type of ammunition, but instead of a tin can filled with metal balls, the case rounds carried a small powder charge; this powder was to disperse the shrapnel. The projectile had been known since at least the 16th century and was known by various nicknames in the 17th century such as hailshot or partridge shot. Rounds recovered from Henry VIII's warship Mary Rose were wooden cylinders filled with broken flint flakes; when filled with rubbish or scrap the round could be known as langrage. In 1718 Blackbeard aka Edward Teach armed his guns with a range of makeshift weaponry including langrage. Several of his cannon, still loaded with spikes and shot, have been recovered from the wreck site of his flagship, the Queen Anne's Revenge.
Archaeologists have retrieved conglomerations of lead shot, nails and glass from the site. Langrage was found among the artifact assemblage of the Mardi Gras shipwreck, 4000 ft deep in the Gulf of Mexico; the defenders of The Alamo used old horseshoe nails and chopped up iron horseshoes to make their scrapshot. Various types of canister were devised for specific models of artillery field pieces. In 1753, the "secret howitzer", a special gun with an oval bore—intended to spread shot wider—was introduced into Russian service, but proved unsuccessful; the Royal Artillery Museum at Woolwich, holds examples of two early 18th century experimental French wide bore cannon—flattened tubes intended to scatter canister wide but in one horizontal plane. When fired, the canister disintegrates and its shards and projectiles spread out in a conical formation, causing a wide swath of destruction, it was effective during the Napoleonic Wars and the American Civil War, where massed troops at close range could be broken up by artillery batteries firing canister.
At times at close range, artillery crews would fire lethal "double canister," where two rounds were loaded into the gun tube and fired using a single charge. At the Battle of Waterloo, in 1815, Mercer's Troop, Royal Horse Artillery, fired a roundshot and a canister from each gun as a double-shot; the roundshot was loaded first with the canister on top. Canister played a key role for Union forces during their defeat of Confederate troops assigned to support Pickett's Charge during the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863. At times, trained artillerists would fire the canister shot towards the ground in front of advancing enemy troops, causing the conical pattern to flatten out as the balls ricocheted and skipped off the terrain; this in effect widened the killing zone. An example of this tactic was at the first day of Gettysburg, where Lt. James Stewart's Battery B, 2nd U. S. Artillery on Seminary Ridge skipped canister shot at Alfred M. Scales's approaching Confederate infantry, breaking up their attack and forcing them to take cover in a depression.
Canister shot was used to good effect by U. S. Marine 37mm anti-tank guns in World War II to break up Japanese Banzai charges. During the Korean War United Nations tanks experienced close-range massed infantry attacks from Communist forces; as a consequence a canister-type tank round was introduced to'sweep' enemy infantry off friendly tanks without harming friendly tank crews, who were behind canister-proof armour. UK weapons known to have fielded a canister round are the 76mm and 105mm tank guns and the 120mm MOBAT and WOMBAT recoilless anti-tank guns; the canister round is known as a case and is still used today in modern artillery in the main armament of tanks with smoothbore cannons. The effect is to turn a large-calibre gun on an armoured fighting vehicle into a giant shotgun; this can be used against enemy infantry when in proximity to friendly armoured vehicles, as the projectiles do not penetrate armour. In addition it can be used to create entry points to buildings, reduce wire obstacles and clear heavy vegetation, as well as strike low flying aircraft and helicopters.
Shrapnel shell was developed from canister during the Napoleonic Wars and was intended to deli
An inclinometer or clinometer is an instrument used for measuring angles of slope, elevation, or depression of an object with respect to gravity's direction. It is known as a tilt indicator, tilt sensor, tilt meter, slope alert, slope gauge, gradient meter, level gauge, level meter and pitch & roll indicator. Clinometers measure both inclines and declines using three different units of measure: degrees and topo. Astrolabes are inclinometers that were used for navigation and locating astronomical objects from ancient times to the Renaissance. A tilt sensor can measure the tilting in two axes of a reference plane in two axes. In contrast, a full motion would use at least three axes and additional sensors. One way to measure tilt angle with reference to the earth's ground plane, is to use an accelerometer. Typical applications can be found in game controllers. In aircraft, the "ball" in turn coordinators or turn and bank indicators is sometimes referred to as an inclinometer. Inclinometers include examples such as Well's in-clinometer, the essential parts of which are a flat side, or base, on which it stands, a hollow disc just half filled with some heavy liquid.
The glass face of the disc is surrounded by a graduated scale that marks the angle at which the surface of the liquid stands, with reference to the flat base. The zero line is parallel to the base, when the liquid stands on that line, the flat side is horizontal. Intervening angles are marked, with the aid of simple conversion tables, the instrument indicates the rate of fall per set distance of horizontal measurement, set distance of the sloping line; the Abney level is a handheld surveying instrument developed in the 1870s that includes a sighting tube and inclinometer, arranged so that the surveyor may align the sighting tube with the reflection of the bubble in the spirit level of the inclinometer when the line of sight is at the angle set on the inclinometer. One of the more famous inclinometer installations was on the panel of the Ryan NYP "The Spirit of St. Louis"—in 1927 Charles Lindbergh chose the lightweight Rieker Inc P-1057 Degree Inclinometer to give him climb and descent angle information.
Hand-held clinometers are used for a variety of measurement tasks. In land surveying and mapping, a clinometer can provide a rapid measurement of the slope of a geographic feature, or used for cave survey. In prospecting for minerals, clinometers are used to measure the strike and dip of geologic formations. In forestry, tree height measurement can be done with a clinometer using standardized methods. Major artillery guns may have an associated clinometer used to facilitate aiming of shells over long distances. Permanently-installed tiltmeters are emplaced at major earthworks such as dams to monitor the long-term stability of the structure. Gravity Temperature, zero offset, vibration, cross-axis sensitivity, acceleration/deceleration. A clear line of sight between the user and the measured point is needed. A well defined object is required to obtain the maximum precision; the angle measurement precision and accuracy is limited to better than one arcsec. Certain sensitive electronic inclinometer sensors can achieve an output resolution to 0.0001°.
An inclinometer sensor's true or absolute accuracy, however, is a combination of initial sets of sensor zero offset and sensitivity, sensor linearity, hysteresis and the temperature drifts of zero and sensitivity—electronic inclinometers accuracy can range from ±0.01–2° depending on the sensor and situation. In room ambient conditions the accuracy is limited to the sensor linearity specification. Tilt sensors and inclinometers generate an artificial horizon and measure angular tilt with respect to this horizon, they are used in cameras, aircraft flight controls, automobile security systems, speciality switches and are used for platform leveling, boom angle indication, in other applications requiring measurement of tilt. Important specifications to consider for tilt sensors and inclinometers are the tilt angle range and the number of axes; the axes are but not always, orthogonal. The tilt angle range is the range of desired linear output. Common implementations of tilt sensors and inclinometers are accelerometer, Liquid Capacitive, gas bubble in liquid, pendulum.
Tilt sensor technology has been implemented in video games. Yoshi's Universal Gravitation and Kirby Tilt'n' Tumble are both built around a tilt sensor mechanism, built into the cartridge; the PlayStation 3 and Wii game controllers use tilt as a means to play video games. Inclinometers are used in civil engineering, for example, to measure the inclination of land to be built upon; some inclinometers provide an electronic interface based on CAN. In addition, those inclinometers may support the standardized CANopen profile. In this case, these inclinometers are compatible and interchangeable. Traditional spirit levels and pendulum-based electronic leveling instruments are constrained by only single-axis and narrow tilt measurement range. However, most precision leveling, angle measurement and surface flatness profiling ta
In firearms, rifling is the helical groove pattern, machined into the internal surface of a gun's barrel, for the purpose of exerting torque and thus imparting a spin to a projectile around its longitudinal axis during shooting. This spin serves to gyroscopically stabilize the projectile by conservation of angular momentum, improving its aerodynamic stability and accuracy over smoothbore designs. Rifling is described by its twist rate, which indicates the distance the rifling takes to complete one full revolution, such as "1 turn in 10 inches", or "1 turn in 254 mm". A shorter distance indicates a "faster" twist, meaning that for a given velocity the projectile will be rotating at a higher spin rate; the combination of length and shape of a projectile determines the twist rate needed to stabilize it – barrels intended for short, large-diameter projectiles like spherical lead balls require a low twist rate, such as 1 turn in 48 inches. Barrels intended for long, small-diameter bullets, such as the ultra-low-drag, 80-grain 0.223 inch bullets, use twist rates of 1 turn in 8 inches or faster.
In some cases, rifling will have twist rates that increase down the length of the barrel, called a gain twist or progressive twist. Long projectiles such as flechettes may require high twist rates. Muskets were smoothbore, large caliber weapons using ball-shaped ammunition fired at low velocity. Due to the high cost and great difficulty of precision manufacturing, the need to load and speedily from the muzzle, musket balls were a loose fit in the barrels. On firing the balls would bounce off the sides of the barrel when fired and the final destination after leaving the muzzle was less predictable; this was countered when accuracy was more important, for example when hunting, by using a tighter combination of a closer to bore sized ball and a patch. The accuracy was improved, but still not reliable for precision shooting over long distances. Barrel rifling was invented in Augsburg, Germany in 1498. In 1520 August Kotter, an armourer of Nuremberg, Germany improved upon this work. Though true rifling dates from the mid-16th century, it did not become commonplace until the nineteenth century.
The concept of stabilizing the flight of a projectile by spinning it was known in the days of bows and arrows, but early firearms using black powder had difficulty with rifling because of the fouling left behind by the combustion of the powder. The most successful weapons using rifling with black powder were breech loaders such as the Queen Anne pistol; the grooves most used in modern rifling have sharp edges. More polygonal rifling, a throwback to the earliest types of rifling, has become popular in handguns. Polygonal barrels tend to have longer service lives because the reduction of the sharp edges of the land reduces erosion of the barrel. Supporters of polygonal rifling claim higher velocities and greater accuracy. Polygonal rifling is seen on pistols from CZ, Heckler & Koch, Glock and Kahr Arms, as well as the Desert Eagle. For tanks and artillery pieces, the extended range, full bore concept developed by Gerald Bull for the GC-45 howitzer reverses the normal rifling idea by using a projectile with small fins that ride in the grooves, as opposed to using a projectile with a oversized driving band, forced into the grooves.
Such guns have achieved significant increases in muzzle range. Examples include the South African G5 and the German PzH 2000. Gain-twist rifling called progressive rifling, begins with little change in the projectile's angular momentum during the first few inches of bullet travel after ignition during the transition from chamber to throat; this enables the bullet to remain undisturbed and trued to the case mouth. After engaging the rifling the bullet is progressively subjected to accelerated angular momentum as burning powder propels it down the barrel. By only increasing the spin rate, torque is spread along a much longer section of barrel, rather than only at the throat where rifling is eroded through repeated rifling engagement. Gain-twist rifling was used as prior to and during the American Civil War. Colt Army and Navy revolvers both employed gain-twist rifling. Gain-twist rifling, however, is more difficult to produce than uniform rifling, therefore is more expensive; the military has used gain-twist rifling in a variety of weapons such as the 20 mm M61 Vulcan Gatling gun used in some current fighter jets and the larger 30 mm GAU-8 Avenger Gatling gun used in the A10 Thunderbolt II close air support jet.
In these applications it allows lighter construction of the barrels by decreasing chamber pressures through the use of low initial twist rates but ensuring the projectiles have sufficient stability once they leave the barrel. It is used in commercially available products, though notably on the Smith & Wesson Model 460. An early method of introducing rifling to a pre-drilled barrel was to use a cutter mounted on a square-section rod twisted into a spiral of the desired pitch, mounted in two fixed square-section holes; as the cutter was advanced through the barrel it twisted at a uniform rate governed by the pitch. The first cut was shallow but as repeated cuts were made the cutter points were expanded—the blades were in slots i
Glossary of British ordnance terms
This article explains terms used for the British Armed Forces' ordnance and ammunition. The terms may have different meanings in the military of other countries. Between decks: applies to a naval gun mounting in which part of the rotating mass is below the deck, part of it is above the deck; this allows for a lower profile of turret, meaning that turrets need not be superfiring The term BL, in its general sense, stood for breech loading, contrasted with muzzle loading. The shell was loaded via the breech followed by the propellant charge, the breech mechanism was closed to seal the chamber. Breech loading, in its formal British ordnance sense, served to identify the gun as the type of rifled breechloading gun for which the powder charge was loaded in a silk or cloth bag and the breech mechanism was responsible for "obturation" i.e. sealing the chamber to prevent escape of the propellant gases. The term BL was first used to refer to the Armstrong breechloaders, introduced in 1859. Following the discontinuation of Armstrong breechloaders and the period of British rifled muzzle-loaders, British breechloaders were re-introduced in 1880.
At this point the term RBL was retrospectively introduced to refer to the Armstrong breechloaders, which had a different breech mechanism, since the term BL has applied to the type of breechloader introduced from 1880 onwards using interrupted-screw breeches. Early British Elswick breechloaders in the 1880s used a steel "cup" obturation method; this was superseded in guns designed by the Royal Gun Factory by the French de Bange method, the basic principle of, still in use today. In British service this became a Crossley pad with an interrupted thread screw block e.g. a Welin screw. The shell was loaded via the breech, followed by the propellant charge in a cloth bag. A single-use "vent sealing tube", a type of primer not dissimilar in appearance to a blank rifle round, was inserted into the breech for firing the gun. While the term "BL" contrasted with "ML", or "muzzleloader" guns, after muzzleloaders were discontinued, the term came to distinguish between traditional, non-obturating guns with fabric propellant bags and separately loaded shells, quick-firing QF guns which used self-sealing brass cartridge cases, which had the propellant and projectile fixed together as a unit for faster handling and loading.
For instance, Britain before World War I had both BL 6 inch guns. Both were "breech loading" in the general sense, but in the formal nomenclature it separated 6-inch guns with breeches designed for charges in brass cartridge cases from those designed for cloth bag charges. Shells designed for one type were not suitable for use in the other type; this presented difficulties for BL guns at high angles. A special cartridge was developed for BL 9.2 inch guns on HA mountings, with provision for a wooden stick to be inserted through the centre to prevent the shell slipping back on elevation. Although fixed ammunition allows for a rapid rate of fire in small to medium guns, BL is a better choice for heavy calibre guns. Using fabric allows for the charge to be broken into small handled units, while it would be difficult to design a system by which multiple small metallic-cased charged were loaded and fired at the same time. Using multiple small fabric bags allows the gunners to use a reduced charge if need be.
The term "BLC" stood for "BL converted" and referred to a breech and breech mechanism modified from an early long-screw three- or four-motion to modern short-screw single-motion. An example is the conversion of the BL 15 pounder to BLC 15 pounder. Calibre radius head: the radius of a circle with the curve of the shell's nose on its circumference, expressed in terms of the shell's calibre; the longer and more pointed the shell's nose, the higher the C. R. H. Typical C. R. H. for British shells leading up to World War I was two: e.g. the curve of the nose of a two C. R. H. Six-inch shell was equivalent to the curve of a circle with a radius of 12 inches. Shells of four C. R. H. were soon developed in World War I, identified by an A following the shell mark number, B for six, so on. For modern streamlined shells post-World War I, two numbers were necessary to more denote a shell's C. R. H. Characteristics. For instance, the World War I 6 inch 26 cwt howitzer shell was two C. R. H; the World War II Mk 2D shell was described as "5/10 C.
R. H.". "Cartridge" in British ammunition terminology refers to the physical object containing the propellant that a gunner loads: For small arms and fixed QF artillery ammunition e.g. the.303 or 18-pounder this denoted the complete round, i.e. cartridge case, percussion cap or primer, propellant charge and projectile. In this use it is synonymous with "round". For separate QF artillery, cartridge referred to the cartridge case, its primer, propellant charge, the disposable lid and fastener of the case. In BL artillery terminology, cartridge referred to the propellant unit only - there was no case. British cartridges up to 1892 contained gunpowder, thereafter sticks of cordite bound up together with an igniter pad if necessary, in a cloth
A side arm or sidearm is a weapon a handgun but sometimes a knife, sword, bayonet, or other mêlée weapon, worn on the body in a holster or sheath to permit immediate access and use. A sidearm is required equipment for military officers and is carried by law enforcement personnel. Uniformed personnel of these services wear their weapons while plainclothes personnel have their sidearms concealed under their clothes. A sidearm may be carried alone, or as a back-up to a primary weapon such as a rifle, shotgun, or submachine gun. In western armies, in many contemporary armies, the issue of a sidearm in the form of a service pistol is a clear sign of authority and is the mark of a commissioned officer or senior NCO. In the protocol of courtesy, the surrender of a commander's sidearm is the final act in the general surrender of a unit. If no ill will is meant, a strict interpretation of military courtesy is applied, a surrendering commander may be allowed to keep his sidearm in order to exercise his right of command over his men.
Many commanders on a local level have been anecdotally cited as having used the threat of their side arms to motivate troops, to varied effect. An important purpose of the side arm is to be used if the primary weapon is not available, if it has run out of ammunition or if it malfunctions. Many Special Forces soldiers armed with an assault rifle or carbine like the M16 or M4 may have a semi-automatic pistol as a side arm. PDWs are issued as personal side arms to combat personnel who operate in cramped spaces in which an assault rifle or carbine would be impractical, such as artillery crews, helicopter crews and tank crews; the term may refer to swords and other mêlée weapons.
Shrapnel shells were anti-personnel artillery munitions which carried a large number of individual bullets close to the target and ejected them to allow them to continue along the shell's trajectory and strike the target individually. They relied entirely on the shell's velocity for their lethality; the munition has been obsolete since the end of World War I for anti-personnel use, when it was superseded by high-explosive shells for that role. The functioning and principles behind Shrapnel shells are fundamentally different from high-explosive shell fragmentation. Shrapnel is named after Major-General Henry Shrapnel, a British artillery officer, whose experiments conducted on his own time and at his own expense, culminated in the design and development of a new type of artillery shell; the term "shrapnel" nowadays is used to refer to lethal fragments of the casing of shells and bombs, though this usage strays from the original meaning of the word. In 1784, Lieutenant Shrapnel of the Royal Artillery began developing an anti-personnel weapon.
At the time artillery could use "canister shot" to defend themselves from infantry or cavalry attack, which involved loading a tin or canvas container filled with small iron or lead balls instead of the usual cannonball. When fired, the container burst open during passage through the bore or at the muzzle, giving the effect of an oversized shotgun shell. At ranges of up to 300 m canister shot was still lethal, though at this range the shots’ density was much lower, making a hit on a human body less likely. At longer ranges, solid shot or the common shell — a hollow cast-iron sphere filled with black powder — was used, although with more of a concussive than a fragmentation effect, as the pieces of the shell were large and sparse in number. Shrapnel's innovation was to combine the multi-projectile shotgun effect of canister shot, with a time fuze to open the canister and disperse the bullets it contained at some distance along the canister's trajectory from the gun, his shell was a hollow cast-iron sphere filled with a mixture of balls and powder, with a crude time fuze.
If the fuze was set then the shell would break open, either in front or above the intended human objective, releasing its contents. The shrapnel balls would carry on with the "remaining velocity" of the shell. In addition to a denser pattern of musket balls, the retained velocity could be higher as well, since the shrapnel shell as a whole would have a higher ballistic coefficient than the individual musket balls; the explosive charge in the shell was to be just enough to break the casing rather than scatter the shot in all directions. As such his invention increased the effective range of canister shot from 300 metres to about 1,100 metres, he called his device ` spherical case shot'. Initial designs suffered from the catastrophic problem that friction between the shot and black powder during the high acceleration down the gun bore could sometimes cause premature ignition of the powder. Various solutions were tried, with limited if any success. However, in 1852 Colonel Boxer proposed using a diaphragm to separate the bullets from the bursting charge.
As a buffer to prevent lead shot deforming, a resin was used as a packing material between the shot. A useful side effect of using the resin was that the combustion gave a visual reference upon the shell bursting, as the resin shattered into a cloud of dust, it took until 1803 for the British artillery to adopt the shrapnel shell. Henry Shrapnel was promoted to major in the same year; the first recorded use of shrapnel by the British was in 1804 against the Dutch at Fort Nieuw-Amsterdam in Suriname. The Duke of Wellington's armies used it from 1808 in the Peninsular War and at the Battle of Waterloo, he wrote admiringly of its effectiveness; the design was improved by Captain E. M. Boxer of the Royal Arsenal around 1852 and crossed over when cylindrical shells for rifled guns were introduced. Lieutenant-Colonel Boxer adapted his design in 1864 to produce shrapnel shells for the new rifled muzzle-loader guns: the walls were of thick cast iron, but the gunpowder charge was now in the shell base with a tube running through the centre of the shell to convey the ignition flash from the time fuze in the nose to the gunpowder charge in the base.
The powder charge both liberated the bullets. The broken shell wall continued forward but had little destructive effect; the system had major limitations: the thickness of the iron shell walls limited the available carrying capacity for bullets but provided little destructive capability, the tube through the centre reduced available space for bullets. In the 1870s William Armstrong provided a design with the bursting charge in the head and the shell wall made of steel and hence much thinner than previous cast-iron shrapnel shell walls. While the thinner shell wall and absence of a central tube allowed the shell to carry far more bullets, it had the disadvantage that the bursting charge separated the bullets from the shell casing by firing the case forward and at the same time slowing the bullets down as they were ejected through the base of the shell casing, rather than increasing their velocity. Britain adopted this solution for several smaller calibres but by World War I few if any such shells remained.
The final shrapnel shell design, adopted in the 1880s, bore little similarity to Henry Shrapnel's original design other than its spherical bullets and time
A field gun is a field artillery piece. The term referred to smaller guns that could accompany a field army on the march, that when in combat could be moved about the battlefield in response to changing circumstances, as opposed to guns installed in a fort, or to siege cannons and mortars which are too large to be moved and would be used only in a prolonged siege; the most famous use of the field gun in terms of advanced tactics was Napoleon Bonaparte's use of large wheels on the guns that allowed them to be moved even during a battle. By moving the guns from point-to-point during a battle, enemy formations could be broken up to be handled by the infantry or cavalry wherever they were massing increasing the overall effectiveness of the attack; as the evolution of artillery continued all guns of any size became capable of being moved at some speed. With few exceptions the largest siege weapons had become mobile by road or rail by the start of World War I, evolution after that point tended to be towards smaller weapons with increased mobility.
The German super-heavy guns in World War II were rail or caterpillar-track mobile. In British use, a field gun was anything up to around 4.5 inches in calibre, larger guns were medium and the largest guns were heavy. Their largest gun was the 5.5 inch Medium, with a range of about 15,000–16,000 yards. Since about the start of World War II, the term has been applied to long-range artillery pieces that fire at a low angle, as opposed to howitzers which can fire at higher angles. Field guns lack a specialized purpose, such as anti-tank or coastal artillery. By the stages of World War II the majority of artillery in use was either in the form of howitzers of 105 mm to 155 mm, or in form of hybrid anti-tank/field guns that had high enough muzzle velocity to be used in both roles; the most common field guns of the era were the British 5.5 inch, the U. S. 155 mm Long Tom and Soviet BS-3 - an artillery piece adapted from a Naval gun and designed to double up as an anti-tank weapon. The U. S. Army tried the long-range gun again in the 1960s with the M107 175 mm gun.
The M107 was used extensively in the Vietnam War and proved effective in artillery duels with the North Vietnamese forces. It was considered a high-maintenance item and was removed from service with U. S. forces after a rash of cracked barrels. Production of the M107 continued through the 1980s to support, the gun continues to be in service with Israeli forces and reserve stocks are held by other former users such as the People's Army of Vietnam. Today the gun finds itself in an area; the class of small and mobile artillery has been filled with increasing capacity by the man-portable mortar, which replaced every artillery piece smaller than 100 mm. Gun-howitzers fill the middle ground, with the world standardizing on either the 155 mm NATO or 152 mm Russian standards; the need for a long-range weapon is filled by rocket artillery and/or aircraft. Modern gun-artillery such as the L118 105mm light gun is used to provide fire support for infantry and armour at ranges where mortars are impractical.
Man-packed mortars lack the range or hitting power of gun-artillery. In between is the rifled towed mortar. Field gun competition Field artillery Infantry support gun Canon de 75 modèle 1897 Field Gun Image Gallery - Royal Naval Museum's Sea Your History website Pictures of Vickers field guns The Royal Navy's field gun competition Portsmouth Action Field Gun - civilians in Portsmouth still running the ex-Royal Navy Command Field Gun run COMMAND100 - Centenary of Inter Command Field Gun