dragoner said:Yep. But best is the grid square remover, it ain't a party until Arty gets there.
Redlegs all the way! My old MLRS unit in the 1st Cav had the battery motto of "Steel Rain". I don't think we coined that (arty has been raining steel and iron and many other things for like forever). But I got a kick out of reading some of the news articles showing nighttime firing of MLRS calling it "steel rain".
Re: the training aspect - Man, I wish we had more training on the Laws, M-60's and even my 40mm grenade launcher I had to cart around. But they were always cheap with the training budgets, except at the end of the fiscal year when we had to go blow everything up all at once or lose our allocation for the next year. We got to go to the range once a year, and aside from basic we never got to play with the wanna-be LAWS. One rocket pod (training even) cost a couple hundred thousand dollars and we could have gotten a lot more smaller ammo for training, but that's not how the Army mind works sadly.
dragoner said:German RR art was called Leichtgeschütz, and used the same warhead as their howitzers, their rocket artillery was all over the place, many of them fired from wooden crates, like the Wurfrahmen. Russians used a lot of German weapons, that the Germans had dropped or taken from them when captured.
RR's have been figured to be mediocre at killing tanks, however, tanks are sort of a past-tense weapon in that just about any country that can make tanks, or modern mbt's, also has nukes. So in the modern battlefield, the RR as an art piece has many more advantages.
The Stackpole series on WW2 has a book on the Red Army and goes into great detail about their artillery systems, their tactics and how they would re-use captured German gear on a regular basis. As an interesting aside, the Germans did the same thing early in the war with captured Allied tanks, as the Pzkw1 and 2 were pretty crappy and outclassed. The Germans just knew how to use them better (though their MG42 was top of the line and remains essentially unchanged in today's Bundeswehr.