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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I got it that the gun moves, but this part:

> The laser target designator is then used to illuminate the target and the in-flight projectile detects the radiant laser energy reflected by the target and the navigation system steers the shell towards the point of greatest incident energy—the designated target with top attack pattern

I think means that the shell basically hits where the drone-laser points at any one moment, not where the drone-laser was pointing when the shell was first fired. Which means that if the target moves then the laser can still remain focused on it for the shell to hit said target, even if the target is moving.

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The point is you can trace back the shell trajectory to its source and counterfire on that source location, unless the gun had already moved. I don't see how what you quoted changed that. Are you saying that because the trajectory is more dynamic that it's harder to trace back to its source, even if it's still there?

Usually tracing the origin of an artillery shot is relatively straight forward if you know one slice of the trajectory because it's a ballistic trajectory. If a counter-battery radar can track a shell before it becomes "guided" then it can determine the point it was fired from. And since tracking the origin of a shot might also use optical and acoustic detection that pinpoints the gun firing real time, fire and move makes total sense even with guided shells.

But at 30Km range even a classic shell becomes hard to precisely track. A guided shell just makes it worse. At long range a counter shot would basically be a blind shot because the target area is large enough to be considered unacceptable.

Or just look for the bloom / back blast from the SPG from orbit / drone

That's the "optical" detection I was referring to. At long range I don't think any ground based device can reliably identify a muzzle flash without LoS.

I missed that.

Then it's an artillery vs artillery battle, and the side with the best artillery wins (ignoring for the moment airspace superiority), which only adds to the point that tanks are mostly obsolete, they're not part of the conversation at all. I do agree that tanks do look cool and that they create more jobs and help preserve more technical know-how in times of peace, but out on today's fronts it looks like they're not as needed as before.

No you have still missed the point.

The counter-battery fire uses radar to calculate where incoming shells are fired from and shoots at that point.

But now the original artillery tries to move away from that point before the counter fire hits it.

That counter fire isn't laser guided.

Then... presumably... the counter fire is tracked and counter-counter-fire is fired based on calculations about where the counter-fire is coming from.

Is the counter-fire mobile as well? Has it moved from its original point of counter-fire?

If not, there's only a couple rounds of this before counter-fire ends.

Unless the counter-fire has longer range, because it's a missile, rather than an artillery round.

Or the counter-fire is protected by a C-RAM system like Phalanx, Iron Dome, MANTIS, or Porcupine/DRACO.

Every counter has a counter. It's turtles all the way down.

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