How is maths related to artillery?

Answer 1

Unlike normal guns, artillery fires its ammunition up in the air and allows gravity to bring it back down to ground. Simply aiming in the direction of the target will not result in a hit.

While simple trial and error can be used to aim artillery, fire the first shot, see where it lands and then adjust the artillery gun a few clicks and fire again, repeating the process until you get a hit, this is slow, wasteful of ammunition, prevents a suprise attack and may potentuallty result in friendly fire.

The trajectory of an artillery shell can be modelled using mathmatics and a knowledge of physics. You know the mass of the artillery shell, and the velocity at which it is fired, and the force of gravity. You can control the direction and angle of the artillery gun, and hopefully calculate the effect of the wind on such a trajectory.

If you plug in the mathmatics, you should be able to calculate that for a given direction and angle, where the artillery shell will land relative the gun. Now assuming you know the location and height of the artillery gun and hopefully know the location and height of the enemy target, all you need to do is work the equasion backwards to calculate which angle and direction you need to fire the artillery gun in to hit the target.

While simple to describe, it can be a little time-consuming to work out all the figures by hand, especally when you have a large number of artillery guns and artillery targets. In fact one of the first uses for the very early computers/counting-machines was to number-crunch artillery trajectories.