Why do the cardinal directions in Mortar fit to the ones shown in the Minecraft-Client when pressing F3, but not to the ones I learned (e.g. Clouds go North) I found a good article on this, please read this.
Why can't I shoot into the air? Do you know what a mortar is? If you don't, please take a look at this picture.
Mortars do not shoot directly at a target, but shoot using a parabolic ballistic trajectory and therefore need a point at the ground to aim at.
Why is the distance for mortarts limited to 120 blocks? This is because the current implementation of getLineOfSight() in Bukkit only allows you to get a player's line of sight within 120 blocks around him (See http://forums.bukkit.org/threads/save-gettargetblock-to-private-var.115429/here). Sorry, but I cannot change this at the moment, but I'll try and create a workaround as soon as possible.
If you encounter this error you do don't have an economy-plugin installed.
Vault only tells an installed economy-plugin what to do but it does not contain the functionality of one.