Blue and Red: Stories From Shanxi
The Battle of Hunter Hill: Day 3
Corporal Dennis Nicholson
"Third day of the assault, they started hitting us with indirect fire to soften us up, so we hunkered down to ride it out. Several of our sniper posts got taken out - lucky hits, I guess - forcing us to consolidate our position and really turtle up.
"We tried some counterbattery fire with our M440s, but the bonies outnumbered us too much for it to make much difference. We had better luck with the Grizzlies' interdiction lasers shooting down the incoming shells.
"In the end, we knew the big push would be coming once the bonies thought we'd gotten used to the monotony of constant bombardment. We figured we had at least few days.
"We were wrong."
Corporal Actaeus Endurani
"We put together some targeting data from our recon run the previous day and hoped they were accurate enough to make a difference. Sniper nests are murder on morale and battlefield organization, but they tend to be very lightly fortified, if at all. A single well-placed shell is usually all it takes.
"Now, sometimes, you can't get a bead on an enemy position, and an orbital strike is excessive. That's why Assault Infantry Legions have organic infantry mortar support. The 96th was no exception.
"Still, although our mortars had internal ammunition fabricators, we didn't carry an excess of power cells. Sustained mortar fire eats through them like you wouldn't believe, and we needed those power cells for our other heavy weapons too.
"We could only shell them with regularity for a day, maybe two at the most, before we had to move on whatever advantage it would give us."
Codex: Infantry Mortars
Indirect fire support is a key component of surface warfare, and with air and orbital support impractical for some situations or unreliable due to various conditions that can affect the theater of war, the humble infantry mortar remains the indirect fire weapon of choice, second only to grenade launchers.
Typically operated by a crew of two, Alliance infantry mortars operate on the same basic principle that mortars have used for centuries: a reinforced tube with a sealed end on an incline, into which a mortar shell with a warhead on one end and a contact-detonated chemical propellant on the other is dropped. Even robotechnology did not retire the simple mortar from the battlefield, instead only refining the concept with more powerful explosives and lighter and stronger alloys. The venerable M440 60mm mortar, for example, is a base plate free infantry mortar with a collapsing tripod that allows a single soldier to carry and operate it if necessary, and it has served in the Alliance armory for over a century and a half. Alliance mortars typically use fragmentation, high explosive, or plasma shells and boast higher yields than comparable Citadel mortars, and the M440's lighter design afforded Alliance mortar teams on Shanxi greater mobility than their turian counterparts.
Citadel-designed infantry mortars, however, are far more sophisticated. Built with internal ammunition fabricators, turian infantry mortars only require a steady supply of raw materials and power cells to operate, often with a higher rate of fire than a comparable Alliance mortar crew. They can custom fabricate mortar shells of various yields and use mass accelerator technology to launch the shell at the precise velocity required, allowing the crew to fine tune the range of each shot in a much more precise manner than Alliance mortars.
Since the Relay War, the UEDF has experimented with more sophisticated mortar designs similar to those used by the Citadel, but has deemed them too heavy and bulky for unpowered infantry, redundant for Cycloners, and overall not reliable enough to meet rigorous new standards set in place in response to the difficulties with the LR-90 laser rifle.