How do mortars launch the shell? In all the movies i’ve seen they just drop the shell in the tube and it launches. Does the shell have somesort of launcher built in or is it the tube?
Hogg, G. Encyclopaedia of Weaponry, 1998.
“…the engineer Wilfred Stokes developed a simple weapon consisting of a… smooth bored barrel supported on a bipod… A cylindrical bomb, with a shotgun cartridge full of powder at the bottom and a simple time fuse at the nose, was dropped down the barrel. On striking the fixed firing pin, the cartridge exploded and the bomb was blown from the tube… The Stokes mortar was put into service in 1915. Stokes next designed a fin stabilised bomb that flew without tumbling… At the end of the 1914-18 war the stokes mortar had become more or less the accepted standard.”
There have been a few advancements made in the fit of bomb to barrel and the type os fuses used, but the same basic design is in use today.
Near the tail of a mortar, small bags or rings of propellant that have an extremely fast burn rate are attached, the number of which help determine how far/high the shell will be fired. The base of the tail contains what is basically a primer. When the shell is dropped into the tube, the primer strikes a firing pin at the bottom. The primer flame passes through holes in the tail section, igniting the bags or combustible rings which create the propelling gases. the ribs that are usually visible on the shell body expand slightly, creating a gas seal and voila, shell is launched out towards the bad guys.
On a closely related note: this got me thinking about automatic mortars that supposedly armed certain Soviet-bloc vehicles through the 1980’s. I’ve never come across any detailed information on how these work. Is it just something on the other side of the fuzzy line between grenade launchers (usually under 60mm) and mortars (usually over 60mm)? I know that there is a great distinction between common mortars and common grenade launchers (I have fired the US Mk19, M203, & M79 grenade launchers and have seen 60mm, 81mm, and 4.2in mortars up close and personal) but what exactly is an automatic mortar?
Gross range of a mortar shell can be changed by pulling some of the propellant off the base (Pulling ‘increments’, IIRC).
Here you go.