Sword of Light: Humanoid Self-Propelled Artillery

Chapter 289 Recoil-Propelled Artillery

So, under Smith's roar, the Air Force had no choice but to send reconnaissance planes to investigate the enemy's artillery positions again.

As for Battalion Commander Yang's side, it was the same old routine: after two minutes of rapid firing, he would coat the gun barrel with snow to cool it down.

Meanwhile, under Wang Gensheng's orders, the leader of the Eighty-Nine Lions began to set up multiple fake artillery positions to confuse the US reconnaissance aircraft.

Then, naturally, the reconnaissance planes dropped red smoke beacon flares.

Then the bombers followed the instructions of the red beacon smoke bombs and dropped a large number of bombs to bomb the fake artillery positions.

The actual artillery positions, however, had been buried in snowdrifts.

Fifty centimeters of snow allowed Battalion Commander Yang to easily operate the snow-buried howitzer.

Meanwhile, the US bombers could only bomb the fake artillery positions that had been prepared for them.

Half an hour later, Battalion Commander Yang's voice came through the walkie-talkie:
"Wang Siling, my cannon barrel has cooled down. Shall we fire again?"

In response, Wang Gensheng said:

"Don't fire yet. Wait for my order. I'm going to do some reconnaissance now to see if the US military is still repairing the airport runway!"

As Wang Gensheng spoke, he started the H5 helicopter again and took to the sky. Of course, Wang Gensheng still brought Li Xiu with him this time.

What Wang Gensheng didn't expect was that Smith didn't order the repair of the airport runway in Hagaru-ri this time.

There were no soldiers on the airport runway, so Wang Gensheng immediately ordered Battalion Commander Yang to continue waiting.

Smith couldn't wait any longer than ten minutes, as more and more wounded soldiers were arriving at Hagaru-ri Airport.

Meanwhile, Smith received repeated assurances from Air Force Chief William that the artillery positions of the reinforcements had been destroyed.

Smith then ordered work to resume to repair the craters in the airport runway caused by the 155mm grenades.

It's worth noting that while the craters created by the 155mm howitzer weren't as large as the ones Wang Gensheng created with his explosive charge, there were many of them!
There are more than a hundred potholes scattered across the airport runway!

When Wang Gensheng learned from Liu Xiu that Smith had started building the airport again, he immediately began shelling it again without saying a word.

There was no calibration, because it had already been calibrated before, so this time it started with continuous rapid firing.

The gun was fired until the barrel reached an excessively high temperature, at which point the firing stopped.

Of course, this howitzer only needs to be calibrated once to fire continuously, thanks in large part to the recoil buffer device on the howitzer. It's important to know that artillery has been developing for nearly a thousand years. Starting with the Thunderclap Cannon of the Southern Song Dynasty, and through the refinement and development by countless weapon designers over nearly a millennium, the structure of modern artillery is far more complex than that of ancient cannons.

When modern artillery fires, you can often see the gun barrel "retract" slightly. This is because modern artillery uses recoil-counter mechanisms to counteract the enormous recoil force generated during firing.

After all, we learned in junior high school physics that forces are reciprocal. As the caliber of artillery pieces increased and their power gradually improved, the enormous recoil generated during firing also had a significant impact on the artillery itself. In addition to impacting the artillery's components and reducing its robustness, the movement of the artillery piece after each shot forced the gunner to re-aim, severely reducing the rate of fire.

The reason why early artillery could not counteract the enormous recoil generated during firing was that most of the gun carriages at that time were rigid carriages, with the gun barrel directly and rigidly connected to the carriage. In this case, most of the recoil force during firing was transmitted back to the carriage, causing the gun to shift.

Around 1890, with the development of hydraulic devices and high-strength industrial springs, recoil mechanisms for artillery began to appear. However, at this time, the recoil mechanisms for artillery were still relatively simple and had poor recoil efficiency, so they were mainly deployed on larger artillery pieces such as coastal defense guns, fortress guns, and naval guns.

Early artillery equipped with recoil mechanisms was generally recoil-reversing artillery. As the name suggests, this type of artillery counteracted the huge recoil generated when firing by moving the entire gun carriage backward.

The structure of a recoil-mounted artillery piece can be mainly divided into two parts: the upper part is mainly the barrel and the rigidly connected sliding gun mount, while the lower part is a sliding rail with a certain tilt angle.

During artillery firing, the gun barrel rises along the slide rail from the bottom due to recoil, converting the kinetic energy of the recoil into high potential energy. Then, the upper part returns to its original position under its own weight, completing a full recoil cycle.

Early artillery mostly adopted a recoil-recoil design because the weight of the artillery itself, combined with the effect of the inclined rails, could compensate for the low efficiency of the recoil mechanism caused by the insufficient performance of early hydraulic devices and springs.

Of course, recoil-propelled artillery also has many problems. Because the carriage and rails are crucial components of the recoil mechanism, the larger the caliber of a recoil-propelled artillery piece, the larger its size, and consequently, the more cumbersome its operation. Secondly, recoil-propelled artillery has lower firing accuracy; the longer the rails, the lower the accuracy.

When a recoil-operated artillery piece is fired, the position of the barrel will change significantly.

In recoil-propelled artillery, the barrel begins to move the instant the shot is fired. When the shell leaves the barrel, the barrel has already moved a certain distance, causing the shell to deviate from the target the gunner had previously aimed at. The larger and steeper the rail, the higher the recoil efficiency, and the worse the artillery's firing accuracy becomes. This cycle repeats itself, creating a vicious cycle.

To address this issue, artillery designers began increasing the use of hydraulic systems and high-strength springs in the recoil mechanism, which somewhat alleviated the problem of insufficient firing accuracy. However, fundamentally, the problem remained unsolved, thus sowing the seeds for the decline of recoil-propelled artillery.

As recoil-operated artillery proved inaccurate, weapon designers changed their approach and developed a recoil-operated anti-recoil device.

The biggest difference between recoil-operated and platform-operated artillery is that in recoil-operated artillery, only the barrel moves during operation, and the barrel angle does not move vertically as in platform-operated artillery during the "retraction" process.

Therefore, multiple shells leave the barrel at similar angles, so the gunner doesn't need to constantly adjust the gun like with a recoil-operated cannon, which also helps to increase the rate of fire.

The German Schneider M1897 field gun, also known as "Miss 75" by military enthusiasts, is a recoil-operated artillery piece. It was the first recoil-operated artillery piece to appear on the battlefield and enter actual combat, and can be said to be the ancestor of all recoil-operated artillery developed to date.

The cannon used by Li Yunlong to bombard Ping'an County in the TV series "Bright Sword" was this very cannon.

The barrel of the Schneider M1897 field gun was mounted on a slide rail on the gun carriage. When the gun was fired, the barrel retracted, applying the recoil force to a spring mechanism on the gun carriage. The spring mechanism then used the stored energy to return the barrel to its original position, allowing the gun to fire again.

(End of this chapter)