Basic Firing Procedures

Distance Mortarman

Drawing Circles

Direct Mortar

In my experience, there are two basic ways to fire the mortar, and in any particular engagement, they are mutually exclusive. However, they can be combined over the life of the mortarman, assuming the mortarman survives for more than one engagement.The most annoying and irritating mortarman is the distance mortarman. These mortarmen are the ones who sit around distant ammo crates and in the Japanese spawn to fire off their mortar rounds, safe from any American soldier who seeks to kill them mid-barrage. The basic firing procedure for these mortarmen is usually to fire all of their rounds (4 shells for level 0 mortarman, 6 shells for level 5 mortarman), reload at an ammo crate, and fire off all of their rounds again. Personally, I fire 11 shells at the start; 6 shells, reload, then 5 shells, saving my last shell for myself. I will get into this in the reloading segment.Here I am on the roof of the Peleliu C building, demonstrating the variable firing range of the mortar. The closest indirect fire distance is 50m, while the furthest indirect fire distance is 190m; these indirect ranges increase at 10m intervals. Note that these ranges are very general, and the actual distance may range anywhere between -10m to 220m depending on the angling of the tube itself. In general, the tube should be angled at 45° for the provided range markers to be accurate.The best friend of the distance mortar is his map.Here I am on Peleliu, showing off the all-important tool for the mortar that is the map. For demonstration and ease of reproduction, I started up a local game with no bots, meaning I can't demonstrate the use of recon here.Using the mouse wheel, I can scroll in and out of the map, which is very important for precision mortaring. Let's say that I know an enemy is sitting on the truck in the distance, as marked on the map below.Now, how I know he is there is irrelevant. What is relevant is that there is an enemy on the truck, and that he must be eliminated. Note that here, I chose the truck because I couldn't figure out a reliable way to get a third person camera (later I found I could use a bot to simulate a camera, but I had already finished this section by that point). Either way, on the truck, in front of the truck, behind the truck are effectively all the same for a skilled mortarman.I have a visual on the truck to make watching for hits a bit easier. In an actual game, this is very bad; if you can see him, he can and will see you, and your indirect fire mortar will take longer to reach him than his bullets. Therefore, your view will more likely than not just be a wall.While I initially chose the truck randomly (it was the biggest thing visible from the position I was in, and I was as far into the American spawn as I could get without spawn protection killing me), it turns out that it was in a far more convenient spot than I initially realised. On the tactical screen, note that objective B is 90m away from my position. I adjust my mortar to 90m.For the mortarman, the flow of the game is unimportant. What is important to him is positioning and...Drawing circles! Now, you may ask, what on earth am I talking about?This, my friend, is what I am talking about. Now, coincidentally (everything in this guide just so happened to work out the way it did; I did not plan for this at all), objective A wasexactly 90m away, so I was able to mentally draw a circle with a radius of exactly 90m from my position that went through the centre points of both objective A and objective B. As if graced by the heavens, the truck also was exactly 90m away!As you can see, my mortar range is 90m, my distance to the objectives is 90m, and my target is 90m away. With this circle drawn from a guaranteed measurement, I now know exactly how far and where to shoot.The mortar's indirect fire range is slightly inaccurate; all shells fired at the given range will either land slightly short or slightly distant depending on angle and elevation. In this case, my mortar was raised relative to my target, a test shot revealed that I would be unable to kill a target on the truck using the range as-is. Therefore, I tilted my mortar back somewhat to decrease the range (not so much to be equivalent to the 80m range), and I was able to hit my target.(Yes, I know this next picture is direct fire; I couldn't get a snazzy picture of indirect fire that didn't look like I was just sitting there.)Seconds later, the mortar round hit where I wanted it to.Any soldier on the truck would be dead. Any soldier behind the truck would also be dead if I tilted my mortar forward just a little bit. And naturally, any soldier in front of the truck would be dead if my mortar missed (someone would just shoot them), and dead if my mortar hit (for obvious reasons).That is my basic indirect mortar firing procedure. If a target is not exactly on a well-placed circle, then I enlarge or shrink the circle; I will cover this in a more advanced firing procedure that covers exactly how I accomplish this task.The mortar is capable of direct fire, and while it is not its primary purpose, it can be quite effective in certain scenarios. Generally, direct firing the mortar will not have the same psychological effect as indirect fire, since the enemy may see where you're firing from and curse their slow reaction time rather than curse the heavens. However, there is a way to use the mortar in direct fire mode to instill the same sense of dread as a flamethrower: clearing rooms.This way of using the mortar may seem obvious; one runs to a door with the mortar, fires a round inside, and expects at least one or two kills with a high probability of killing oneself in the process. While this method is almost guaranteed to obtain kills, it is not the optimal way to use the mortar as the mortar may be dropped and stolen by an enemy (unless the mortar only had one shell left, which case this method is fine). The best way to use direct fire mortar is to sit about 50-70m away from the target and fire through windows, doorways, and bunker slits to hit the roofs and walls of rooms. The closed nature of these rooms will mean the explosion will be close enough to enemy troops that they will almost always end up in pieces.