Artillery

=Artillery= Artillery is a weapon of war that operates by projection of munitions far beyond the effective range of personal weapons. Artillery comprise specialised devices which use some form of stored energy to operate, whether mechanical, chemical, or electromagnetic. Originally designed to breach fortifications, they have evolved from nearly static installations intended to reduce a single obstacle to highly mobile weapons of great flexibility in which now reposes the greater portion of a modern army's offensive capabilities.

Originally artillery was any group of infantry primarily armed with projectile weapons. Since the development of cannon, the word "artillery" in practice has largely meant cannon; in contemporary usage it usually refers to shell-firing guns, howitzers, mortars, and rockets. In common speech the word artillery is individual devices, together with their accessories and fittings, although these assemblages are more properly called equipment. By association, artillery may also refer to the arm of service that customarily operates such engines.

Artillery is the most lethal form of land-based armament; in the Napoleonic Wars, World War I and World War II the vast majority of combat deaths were caused by artillery. In 1944, Joseph Stalin said in a speech that artillery was "the God of War".

Weapons
The types of cannon artillery are generally distinguished by the velocity at which they fire projectiles. Types of artillery:
 * Field Artillery: mobile weapons used to support armies in the field. Subcategories include:
 * Infantry Support Guns: directly support infantry units.
 * Mountain Guns : lightweight weapons that can be moved through difficult terrain.
 * Field Guns : capable of long range fire.
 * Howitzers : capable of high angle fire, they are most often employed for indirect-fire.
 * Gun Howitzers : capable of high or low angle fire with a long barrel.
 * Mortars : typically short-barreled, high-trajectory weapons designed primarily for an indirect-fire role.
 * Anti-Tank Artillery : weapons, usually mobile, designed for attacking tanks.
 * Anti-Aircraft Artillery : weapons, usually mobile, designed for attacking aircraft from the ground. Some guns were suitable for dual-role anti-aircraft and field (anti-tank) use. The World War II German 88 mm gun was a famous example.
 * Rocket* Artillery : rocket-launched instead of shot or shell.
 * Motorized Artillery: towed by Artillery tractors or APU-installed.
 * Self-Propelled Artillery: typically guns, mortars or gun howitzers mounted on a vehicle.
 * Railway Gun: large-caliber weapons that are mounted on, transported by and fired from specially-designed railway wagons.
 * Naval Artillery: guns mounted on warships and used either against other ships or in support of ground forces. The crowning achievement of naval artillery was the battleship, but the advent of air-power and missiles have rendered this type of artillery largely obsolete. They are typically longer-barreled, low-trajectory, high-velocity weapons designed primarily for a direct-fire role.
 * Coastal Artillery: Fixed-position weapons dedicated to defense of a particular location, usually a coast (for example, the Atlantic Wall in World War II) or harbor. Not needing to be mobile, coastal artillery used to be much larger than equivalent field artillery pieces, giving them longer range and more destructive power. Modern coastal artillery (for example, Russia's "Bereg" system) is often self-propelled, (allowing it to avoid counter-battery fire) and fully integrated, meaning that each battery has all of the support systems that it requires (maintenance, targeting radar, etc.) organic to its unit.

Ammunition
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