On Wed, 09 Mar 2016 17:31:09 -0500, John H.
wrote:

On Wed, 09 Mar 2016 16:01:49 -0500, wrote:

The "computer" was really a pretty crude thing, working on gears and
cams. All you really got on the radar was range and you computed speed
with a stop watch, then put all of that into the computer with dials
and it gave you a fuse time with a load time offset. That gets relayed
to the fuse setter who dials up the delay, they loaded and fired.
All of this happens while the plane is closing in on you.
Not stressful at all ;-)
I suspect that in the heat of battle, they didn't use it at all. They
just put in a typical delay and fired, just to keep the rate of fire
up to the max. If the gunner had a pretty good idea when the shell was
going off he just used Kentucky windage and fired when he thought the
time was right.
I know our GM-1 "killed" a F4 phantom at the Gitmo exercises that was
flying at about double the speed our equipment was rated for, using
the same method.

We had a lot of time compared to what the anti-aircraft folks would have. We didn't
have radar, of course, but 1/50K maps to get our range and azimuths from. Wind data
came from our local weather folks, and I don't remember what else we used. Only did
it once.

The larger guns, usually used to engage surface targets, take into
account everything from the humidity of the air to the curvature of
the earth. They also had to compensate for the pitch and roll of the
ship. That was basically what FT school was all about. They started
out, right after the basic electronics courses, with "the fire control
problem" and the trig necessary to solve the various factors. It took
us about a week to plot the first shot, understanding what each factor
was but the second one went a lot faster. After two weeks you really
started wanting to find out about the computers that do this for you
;-)
These things were still big mechanical boxes way up into the 60s.
Now you could do it on your phone.
There was also a lot of training in the syncros, servos and the
mechanical systems that point the gun.
It was 18 weeks of something new every day but I really had a pretty
good time and learned a lot of things about a lot of things.