using smartphones to aim mortars

This year Google is releasing Project Ara, a modular smartphone.

With these phones you will be able to add and remove pieces (screen, camera, battery, wifi module…) as you want. And modules are projected to be as cheap as $10.

Now I was looking at video from the fighting in Syria, and saw people complain that the other side was shooting with anti-tank weapons that outrange them (at 4 km). So I looked it up, and found that Mortars can range up to 6 km. The problem is they can be tricky to aim, especially against a mobile target.

So I was thinking, how about you put together an Ara phone with a camera, a laser range finder, a gps, a gyroscope and a radio module.
Someone in the front line sticks this baby over cover, aims it at the enemy. He doesn’t even have to expose his head.
The phone knows its own location thanks to the gps module, and if pointed at a target it can use the gyroscope and laser range finder to determine the target’s exact gps position.

Then the radio is used to vox that target data to a mortar team hiding behind a hill nearby.
That mortar team has another Ara phone attached to its mortar. This one is equiped with gps, radio and gyroscope.
The mortar phone then uses the targetting data to calculate the exact angle at which to fire the mortar.
All the mortar crew has to do is aim as the phone suggests, drop in the round et voila.

You can even keep the targetter phone aimed at the target and keep sending updated targetting data to the mortar phone, that’s interesting against a moving target.
Not as effective as gps guided rounds, but certainly a lot cheaper.