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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I was in the artillery for 6 years and can provide some accurate information on this. Your question has two parts and i will answer the second one first.
In order to retain calibration there are multiple parts. The first is that even through you see the gun move it is mostly held in place by a large circular piece of metal with spikes on it that the wheels roll up onto. The gun is then connected to this piece of metal to hold it generally in place whle still allowing it to turn. There are also “spades” on the end of the two long legs that counterbalance the barrel which stop the gun itself moving backwards so most of what you see move is really just the recoil mechanism of the barrel. After each shot there is also a thing that looks like a small telescope witha tiny scale inside it and the person responsible for aiming the gun points the guns aiming mechanism at it and this realigns the gun to the same bearing. This is initially setup using a director which is like a theodolite that a surveyor uses to tell the guns the direction they are pointing and to align all of them exacty the same.
For the first part everyone is taught how to do this with basic hand tools before they learn how to do it using the computer, rangefinder and GPS. There is a book that shows every mil of elevation the gun can point and how far it will go with each charge (with artillery, unlike a bullet, the cartridge case or charge bag is separate from the projectile). This means you can look at the book and say that since the target is 5km away you need to use charge 4 at an agle of 400 mils (the army uses mils not degrees for this stuff since it is more accurate) to reach that exact distance. There is also a group of slide rules that do the same thing (one for each charge).
To calculate the bearing the foward observer simply tries to identify the exact location on a map then sends those coordinates to the command post in the battery. The command post operators then work out the bearing the guns need to point using the position of the battery and the position they are trying to hit. It also varies slightly per gun since they are spread out and may also use different types of fire (linear, circular, converging, etc).
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