unlucky caz wrote:
The "knee mortar" could be very useful. Something light weight that a infantry squad could use for suppression fire. Each trooper carries a few rounds for it in thier standard pack with all their normal stuff. Similar to how a squad would carry the ammo for the support MG in WWII. And as the HE rounds come into production the large mortars will not be needed as much as they could have the same blasting charge size in a smaller "shell".
If you are referring to the WW2 Japanese 'knee mortar', first, it wasn't a mortar- it was a grenade launcher. Secondly, the name is a serious misnomer. The base plate is curved but was intended to be placed on the ground. Shooting a 'knee mortar' off your thigh when kneeling will get you a broken femur. It is a kind of cool invention. There's no bipod, so to the shooter has to keep one hand on the tube and adjust the angle by guesstimate and experience. To fire, you pull a lanyard at the bottom.
I heard the story about shooting a knee mortar in that manner when I was a little kid. My Grandfather was in a heavy weapons platoon on Guadalcanal and saw the results of trying to shoot a 'knee mortar' that way first hand.
I do agree that something like it would be handy but let's go with a different design on the base plate this time. Even with a single operator, you should be able to put out a pretty good rate of fire. Someone well trained with a good 'eye' for shooting one would be quite deadly.
On a different topic, I found a link of Mike Venturino discussing a trip he made to a military testing facility where they were using state of the art equipment (radar telemetry and such) to test several Sharps buffalo gun rounds. Since the current Charisan rifle round is quite similar, I thought that some here would enjoy it. The results (especially the maximum range achieved) is jaw dropping. They were able to match the distance of the legendary Billy Dixon shot at Adobe Walls with only a 4.5 to 5 degree elevation of the muzzle. That much elevation would have been easy to adjust for with even just the barrel mounted rear sights of the guns of the period- much less something designed for long range sighting like a tang sight.
http://powderburns.tripod.com/sharps.html