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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure what *specific* weapons have been used on cities. Usually we see cruise missiles going into buildings, for example. Lots of video of tanks too.

I think of artillery as less precise, with the idea of using it to indiscriminately level a large area. It’s fired from 10-20 miles away, with a few rounds a minute.

Howitzers, for instance, will be important in eastern Ukrainian

https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/30...

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Russia uses a lot of unguided rockets as artillery

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BM-21_Grad

Modern artillery pieces are incredibly accurate. And if self-propelled and equiped with an auto-loader capable of rapid fire.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panzerhaubitze_2000

Up to 3 roubds in 9 seconds, 10 - 13 roubds per minute continously. Depeding on the shells accuracy can be around 1 m per 48 km. Arguably, that's among the most advanced, and expensive systems. The accuracy comes from the shells, so in theory a lot of manually loaded artillery pieces should be able to achieve the accuracy.

What type of shell achieves that level of accuracy?

That would be this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/M982_Excalibur

At 70k USD per round not nrcessarily cheap so.

That's what I suspected. The impressive accuracy is mostly determined by the round.

That's not terribly expensive either when the accuracy can save civilian lives or the lives of soldiers using it.

Reducing colleteral damage is a stated goal of that round. Personally, I think it's just a nice side effect and nobody really cares.

It's a win win. You more reliably kill threats which saves the lives of your own guys but also spares civilians.

Artillery has become very precise. The mechanics and effects are well defined and calculated. Artillery also isn't just big guns, it includes those trucks you see shooting huge volleys of (dumb) missiles off their bed.

> I think of artillery as less precise, with the idea of using it to indiscriminately level a large area.

Even conventional unguided howitzer artillery is more than accurate enough to be effective against things as small as vehicles.

I doubt they waste cruise missiles on their general city terror campaigns. It's mostly MLRS, artilery, bombing with unguided bombs from airplanes, and tank shelling, what Russia uses to terrorize cities. They don't need precision for this.

Cruise missiles are used for higher value targets.

The reporting that I've seen claims that Russia doesn't have enough guided ordinance, so they're using lots of unguided ordinance.

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