MG42 (8)

Development of the 6-cm mortar shell, which had seemed like it would be finished in a week, showed no sign of completion even after a month.

At first, I assumed making a shell would be as simple as scaling down a field-gun shell. I was glad we had a good design to work from instead of having to start from scratch. So we disassembled shells, primers, and fuzes from the artillery workshop, examined their structure, then simply reduced their size and fitted them inside the mortar shell's tail.

But the shell we made that way ran into trouble from the very first simulated test.

Field-gun primers were less sensitive than I expected. When a shell was dropped into the muzzle, its body slid down the barrel and its tail struck the firing pin at the bottom, but that impact wasn't enough to do anything. No matter how many times we dropped the shell from a greater height, the result was the same.

“What? Why isn't this thing going off?”

It shouldn't have been defective, since we'd made it after consulting with the military several times.

Just in case, I asked Hardenberg. After hearing my explanation, he answered as if it were obvious.

“A field-gun primer is struck hard by the firing mechanism. But this one is supposed to fall onto the firing pin under the weight of the shell alone, isn't it?”

“Then should we make it more sensitive?”

“If it's too sensitive, it'll go off while being transported.”...