31 Aug
2008
31 Aug
'08
10:44 a.m.
The system I worked on much later used two frequencies and the
resulting intermods for ranging information and that was mixed
with the direction of the tracking radar. This was an
analogue system using synchros (remember Waldo?) to position
the weapon, in this case a missile, in the position that the
boogie would be in.
The first Navy fire control computer was definitely analogue.
bs
On Sat, 30 Aug 2008, Brent Hilpert wrote:
William Donzelli wrote:
Ranging. For fire control, very accurate ranging
is very important, as
it is one of the biggest variables in ballistics equations. Getting
accurate range data out of the radars was thus extremely important, so
the range circuits were very precise, and often employed dividers and
flip flops and such to generate cursor information on the scopes for
the operators.
Interesting, I didn't know they had gotten that complex with the WWII stuff.
Offhand I would have thought they would have used capacitor / pulse-interval
integration techniques for such calculations in that era rather than digital
counters. Not accurate enough perhaps.
(I do have a picture somewhere from WWII of my dad on a Wehrmacht anti-aircraft
gun that he said was automatically ranged and targetted by radar.)