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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If you look at older cannons back in the Age of Sail or American Civil War days when there was no recoil mechanism, and the whole gun was on a single trail and would kick back into the ground, yes aiming and accuracy was very much something that varied greatly between shots. At sea and on land closing the range was the surest way of ensuring accurate fire. Another way was to mass fire. Gather a lot of guns and fire together at the same target. More guns, more likelihood of getting a hit.
Recoil mechanisms changed that. These are tubes filled with hydraulic fluid that are attached to the cannon. When the cannon fires, the cannon still recoils but now the force of the recoil is transmitted to the hydraulic tubes and whole gun carriage is not rocked back. In some guns (like the French rapid fire 75 mm field gun developed before WW1), the mechanism was smooth enough that a rapid accurate rate of fire was possible. But accuracy still largely depended on a human being aiming it.
At sea range finders (think binocular telescopes 20-40 feet across) could accurate determine ranges out to thousands of yards. Mechanical gear and cog calculators could factor in the ship’s speed, the target’s speed and the relative bearing and produce a set of aiming for the guns of the ship.
On land, the properties of weapon and better data (actual muzzle velocity data, consistent ammunition – shells of consistent weight, powder of consistent explosive force) allowed accurate indirect fire based purely on data and not having direct line of sight with the target. When several guns fired on the same target they could cover the area around the target point.
Even more data is now available to the gun crews: wind velocity, temperature, air density, humidity and variations experienced by the gun due barrel heating. These are fed into or available to calculators that rapidly produce elevation and aiming data. In the past, these were done using tables of pre-calculated results but today, computers are available for each battery and gun.
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