I don’t understand how they can accurately aim artillery. When they fire the whole machine moves a great deal and it would seem any calibration of its position would be lost.
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My father was an artillery engineer at Fort Sill , Oklahoma in WWII. His unit was responsible for calibrating the heavy artillery pieces that came from the factories. As he described it, they would fire dummy rounds into a precisely mapped range, each with it’s own unique registration number marked on it. They’d document things like size of the charge, elevation, temperature, wind speed and direction, etc before firing each one. Once the firing stopped, a group of enlisted men were sent down range to collect each shell, noting the exact location where each was found. Once all the data was collected, they’d create slide rules for each artillery piece. As others have noted, though, that was just to get the first rounds close in actual combat. Forward observers we’re still needed to fine tune the final barrage.
I remember as a kid, we had a few of those slide rules laying around, and one of the dummy rounds for a very large door stop in our basement.
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