Forum

How would you stat up soviet rocket artillery like the BM-21/27/30 series? The current arty system seems geared exclusively for tube arty.

Not sure why you would think there is a distinctive difference between rocket and tube artillery. The rocket only burns for a few seconds then the warhead just coasts to the target like a normal artillery round. I would just stat it like an artillery round of the same calibre.

[EDIT]
Well, there is one difference - faster rate of fire. Instead of exploding one shell somewhere on the battle map per round, explode about five or six, and do it continuously for three or four rounds.

Fair question, actually. There are some significant differences. Whether you want to represent them or not is another question.

For starters, rockets are generally less accurate, due to a lot of factors. The surface area (and sometimes flight time) is larger so wind and atmospheric conditions tends to take a bigger effect. The burn time is longer, introducing further potential for error, especially for improvised rockets where chemical consistency might be lacking. Erratic burns can create irregular flight paths. And for MLRS systems, each rocket fired potentially introduces errors to those that follow. This also means that CEP is longer than it is wide (an oval rather than a circle)

All of that adds up to much less accuracy in general for rockets, larger minimum ranges, and generally speaking (maybe a real artillerist can chime in here) a lot less corrective fire - it's more about saturation. CEP for a Grad is 160x300m at 20km, roughly. A 155mm howitzer is about 120m at that range. (I couldn't find numbers for a 122mm easily). Mind you all of these are under more or less factory conditions. Homemade rockets should have a CEP substantially higher... effectively limiting their range except as terror weapons (which is of course how they are often used). Homemade rockets are very common in places like Syria, of course, and it seems likely they would be in T2K, as well -- as long as you can find the relatively simple chemicals.

Of course part of the problem with artillery and especially a rocket barrage in the game is that it's exceedingly deadly if you're anywhere in the area. So, uh, handle with care?

For what it's worth, in previous editions they were treated like other forms of artillery (obviously different damage / stats depending on "calibre") but they had (from memory) double the dispersion because they are less accurate. Previous editions had separate rules (but they were combined for shot placement determination) for dispersion and being off-target.

So, I would say:
- as normal rules but dispersion is x2 (or x1.5 or whatever feels right to you)
- it would be nice to include dispersion rules about inherent accuracy of different types of rounds (which I think is actually how rockets are included vs artillery vs mortars in pervious editions)