Artillery is a class of large military weapons built to fire munitions far beyond the range and power of infantry's small arms. Early artillery development focused on the ability to breach fortifications, and led to heavy, fairly immobile siege engines. As technology improved, lighter, more mobile field artillery developed for battlefield use. This development continues today; modern self-propelled artillery vehicles are highly mobile weapons of great versatility providing the largest share of an army's total firepower.
In its earliest sense, the word artillery referred to any group of soldiers primarily armed with some form of manufactured weapon or armour. Since the introduction of gunpowder and cannon, the word "artillery" has largely meant cannon, and in contemporary usage, it usually refers to shell-firing guns, howitzers, mortars, rockets and guided missiles. In common speech, the word artillery is often used to refer to individual devices, along with their accessories and fittings, although these assemblages are more properly called "equipments". However, there is no generally recognised generic term for a gun, howitzer, mortar, and so forth: the United States uses "artillery piece", but most English-speaking armies use "gun" and "mortar". The projectiles fired are typically either "shot" (if solid) or "shell" (if not). "Shell" is a widely used generic term for a projectile, which is a component of munitions.
Artillery games are early two or three-player (usually turn-based) video games involving tanks fighting each other in combat or similar. Artillery games are among the earliest computer games developed; the theme of such games is an extension of the original uses of computer themselves, which were once used to calculate the trajectories of rockets and other related military-based calculations. Artillery games have been described as a type of "shooting game", though they are more often classified as a type of strategy video game.
Early precursors to the modern artillery-type games were text-only games that simulated artillery entirely with input data values. A BASIC game known simply as Artillery was written by Mike Forman and was published in Creative Computing magazine in 1976. This seminal home computer version of the game was revised in 1977 by M. E. Lyon and Brian West and was known as War 3; War 3 was revised further in 1979 and published as Artillery-3. These early versions of turn-based tank combat games interpreted human-entered data such as the distance between the tanks, the velocity or "power" of the shot fired and the angle of the tanks' turrets.
Artillery refers to any engine used for the discharge of large projectiles during war.
Artillery may also refer to:
Damned cold light - shines day and night
No windows here to tell - could this be Hell
I'm chained to my bed - asked for confession
It makes me depressed - their search for obsession
Filled with L.S.D. - for their cynic eyes to see
The caos inside of me - (just) let it be
How long have I been here - it could be months it could be years
And the way they wake me up - they do it with electro-shock
When you're in the Y.S.P.C.A.
Your pain is getting worse everyday
Day and night escape is on your mind
But the exit is not for you to find
You are just another lunatic
Strait jacket on, keep still you little prick
You will be locked in your padded cell
Just to face your own private Hell
They fill my mind with Therapy - so there is no way out
The force of luna's takin' me - I scream but there's no sound
For them my life had just begun - experimenting on and on
In this obsure insanity no heaven sent is saving me
Filled with L.S.D. - for their cynic eyes to see
The caos inside of me - (just) let it be
How long have I been here - it could be months it could be years
And the way they wake me up - they do it with electro-shock
When you're in the Y.S.P.C.A.
Your pain is getting worse everyday
Day and night escape is on your mind
But the exit is not for you to find
You are just another lunatic
Strait jacket on, keep still you little prick
You will be locked in your padded cell