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Comment by closewith | Hacker News Reader

With respect, an M777 battery could saturate a grid square in minutes. The expected injury radius of a 155mm is ~150m, so conservatively 100 rounds would blanket a 1km*1km array. A six gun battery can fire ~36 rounds per minute comfortably. 100 rounds could be fire and the battery could be packing up before the first one hit.

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Yeah, people drastically underestimate the raw firepower of artillery. The M270 is called "the grid square removal system" for a reason. (Grid square refers to 1km x 1km area.)

We no longer have the M26 rockets used in grid square removal. They've all been decommissioned in favor of M30/M31 GMLRS guided rockets, which don't have submunitions. Oddly, "grid square removal system" is actually a backronym, as the original designation of the M270 was General Support Rocket System (GSRS)

That's largely due to the general move away from cluster munitions. There's still plenty of the M30 series, whose 160,000 preformed tungsten fragments would be an ideal weapon for use against a fragile and static solar array.

As a note: the US Military isn't going away from cluster munitions because we don't want to leave UXO for civilians to accidentally blow themselves up with, but rather because we don't want to leave UXO for US military to accidentally blow themselves up with. If we drop 12x M26 missiles on a grid square, then that's something like 7.7k submunitions. With a 14% dud rate, that's 1k submunitions somewhere waiting for us to roll over them.

This. As a former infantryman the one thing that still strikes me with awe to this day is the destructive power of artillery. People cannot fathom what it’s capable of.

Go up in a tall building, maybe to the 20th floor or so. Eyeball a built up area 1km square. Now picture every structure reduced to rubble in an instant. Now imagine 10km square reduced to rubble in just a few minutes.

Quick work for an artillery battery.

Never experienced it myself but seeing those piles of shells from WWI just sends my brain to uninitialized memory.

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/shells-creeping-bombardment...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUvcdKGD-FM <-- What it's like be hit by 130mm artillery.

One thing that the video can't simulate is how loud those explosions are. You don't just hear the sound wave, even from a safe distance you feel the pressure wave in your entire body.

Reminds me of a day I was fishing from a pier at the beach some time ago. Older dude came up to me and started talking and got into his "time in 'Nam." He pointed at some apartment buildings across the bay, "we'd call in an airstrike and they'd make one pass and everything would be gone. Those buildings? You'd just see some bricks and rubble left behind." To 25 year-old me that was a pretty sobering thought.

That injury radius must be on land right? Like if it hits water how destructive could the splash be?

Gunners would use proximity fuzes to airburst above the target in this application. TBH 100 rounds is wildly conservative - I can't imagine a better target for artillery than a fragile and static solar array.

What's the range? 15 miles?

I agree though. Solar on the battlefield doesn't make sense since it is not mobile and cannot be concealed or protected.

I do think the centralized nature of massive diesel generators and their fuel supply lines are a tactical weak point though. I like the idea of flexible distributed power grids for troops but I'm not sure solar fits the bill.

It would be cool to hear some input from generals and see some proof of concepts.

> What's the range? 15 miles?

For M30A2, 70km or ~43 miles.

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