Multiple rocket launcher

A multiple rocket launcher is a weapon platform that fires many rockets in a single volley, trading the precision of a single artillery gun for range, high payload and low recoil. The idea dates to Song dynasty China, whose Huo Che of around 1180 mounted fire lances backward on a pike, and later Chinese designs could loose about a hundred small fire-arrow rockets at once over three to four hundred paces; Koreas Joseon dynasty built an even larger version, the hwacha, whose racks of one to two hundred rocket tubes helped forty of the carts turn back thirty thousand attackers at the Battle of Haengju. The template for the modern self-propelled multiple rocket launcher was set by the Soviet BM-13 Katyusha of the Second World War.