Range-finding and Fire Control - Plotting Your Demise

So

range

and

fire

control

systems for

your

anti-ship weapons are good when there comes that time in life when you really want to blow someone up but you don't have a plane and honestly, they're too far away for a grenade or even a catapult, this is when you need to explode the artillery. Now owning artillery is one thing, getting it to hit something is another and since people don't like them exploding they have the annoying habit of moving to get out of the way there is even a simple trial and error around a fixed point no works very often and, given enough time, these people also tend to find their own artillery to try to

fire

, this is true both at sea and on land, except For an added complication, when you place

your

artillery on a ship, it is a very moving experience and once the significant emotional event is over, the ship also turns out to be underway, while on land, at least most of the time, your position remains more or less the same as before. and after you fire your weapons and if it's not right usually something went very, very wrong and the fine arts of ballistic calculation are no longer your concern, but when the day is going a little better to be able to hit your opponent you need two basic systems of

range

measurement and fire

control

, a range determination is the first thing that matters because anything other than effective melee range, when we talk about ships, your projectile will fall quite significantly under gravity and this is basic ballistics To counter this, it is necessary to raise your weapon so that the ark described while your projectile intersects the target instead of the sea, at least if you are not French or interwar Japanese and to do it correctly you need to know the properties of your weapon and the projectile.

Which hopefully you'll have figured out a bit before when you need to use it in actual combat and need to know how far away the target is to determine the range and therefore how far you need to raise the fire control of your weapon. Next up, in its most basic form, fire control simply tells you when to fire again in the age of sail, this really only had to take into account two issues once range had been established, rolling and rolling because, Unless the gun was actually aimed at the target beautiful shots could be fired at or behind the enemy, who could doubt them in a refreshing spray of sea water, but little else was important because the cannons were fixed to carriages which, With any luck they were staying firmly on the deck and so if the ship was rolling then where the gun was pointing at any given time in the vertical element could change and the vertical component that was imported into The speed of the projectile could also cause it to go further or shorter than it had counted at the time of the shot.

If you shoot well, you'll miss the target, misjudge it, and simply irritate them, although you could also exploit this effect. French ships and many Raiders in the age of sail would tend to fire upwards, which made their shots tend a little high to cut through enemy rigging. British ships, as well as other ships with a more militant outlook, tended to fire downwards, so that more of the workshop would lean towards the bottom of the enemy's hull, also destroying the guns and crew. Like opening holes near the waterline, a side effect of a good fire control system is allowing you to choose how many guns to fire at once and in what order.

This might allow you to do, in the age of sail, a rolling broadside, a full broadside, everything. some partial volley or any number of permutations thereof, this in turn allows you to control the number of variables to both fine-tune your own aim and dictate what kind of effect your fire will have on an enemy now in the old days of the era Of navigating all this range and fire control was done using the old human brain and eyes in the latter part of the period, some enterprising individuals even put some basic iron sights on their weapons, this was largely due to the relatively short range of these cannons.

One good day, you could get a range of about three miles if you wanted to pretend to be a slightly lower angle version of a mortar, but generally speaking, cannon ranges of a mile or less were common and binocular vision of humans was combined with a brain that is relatively good. in simple ballistics it would be enough to calculate how far away they were and how much you need to shoot them, plus it usually had quite a few cannons, so if you really weren't sure, a couple of range shots to calibrate the old noggin wasn't that much. of a problem and therefore engagement ranges would normally take place at a few hundred yards, where the problems began with the invention of armored ships because an armored ship needed a more powerful weapon to penetrate the armor, a weapon More powerful could also send a projectile farther. and one of the best ways to counter the more powerful projectile, besides simply hitting massive amounts of thicker armor, was to simply move further away where the decreasing velocity of the projectile would decrease the amount of armor it could penetrate and therefore we had no You have to increase your armor a lot to stay intact.

The problem with this was that it ran into the parallax problem. Unfortunately, parallax was not at this stage at least a DC supervillain, but rather a limitation of the human body. The reason we are pretty good at estimating the distance to things in general is because of our binocular vision, which we mentioned earlier, each eye sees a slightly different and very similar image because both eyes are looking forward, but being about a few centimeters away, this means that an object at a certain range will appear to be in one place to one eye in relation to its surroundings and in a slightly different place to the other eye this is parallax the difference in angle between the two points of view causes a change in apparent location the greater the difference in angle the greater the change, objects that are closer have large differences in ankle objects that are further away, less and our brain is able to process them based on of the amount of muscle tension you need to use to focus your eyes on a particular object. work out the differences and thus estimate a given range, this works great on a few yards, a few dozen or even a few hundred, but once you start talking on the order of thousands of yards or more, to be honest, anything, about five or six hundred yards on most people.

In some cases, the relatively small distance between our eyes leads to very small variations in the apparent angle, and beyond a certain point, the brain cannot process the resulting small differences with any real precision or meaning. This is why, for example, the moon, planets, stars, satellites and all space stations appear to be approximately the same distance above us in this type of dome and a slightly closer range. Why would watching a pair of planes high in the sky look like they're about to collide only for one of them to seemingly slide over the other because it turns out they're actually several hundred or thousands of feet apart? distance in height applied to ships, the human mind's ability to judge range unaided began to decline long before the maximum range of the guns themselves.

Why in the 1870s, even at relatively low elevation angles, guns could reach between six and nine thousand yards, they reached ten thousand yards quite comfortably in the 1880s and fourteen to fifteen thousand yards and in some cases more in the 1890s, but in the end? From the 1890s on in the Spanish American War battles were still fought between one thousand and three thousand yards for the most part and even here, well, to be completely honest, accuracy was more luck than judgement, the lower end of this range actually It was comfortably within the capabilities of a late 17th century ship of the line, although it was at the time of sale.

I prefer to fight a little closer when possible. There are examples of that particular conflict occurring at just the right moment to demonstrate this. two ships with relatively decent gun crews firing at each other at only a fraction of over a thousand yards and getting minimal to no hits, so a different way of estimating range was needed, just firing salvos based largely on guesswork and then trying to correct for splashes wasn't very helpful either, since the Salvos' splashes would be subject to exactly the same problems when guessing their range as when guessing the range to the target ship, although at least you could tell if you had overshot the target or not, although it was very difficult to judge by how much and, to be honest, with this low rate of fire of the heavy guns at the time an enemy kept up his fire while you wasted a salvo or two. in long range speculative shooting it could probably get in close while you're in the process of reloading and then launch a much more accurate salvo at you in the meantime at point blank range now unfortunately human eyes don't work as well when placed outside their orbits and genetic hybridization with the hammerhead shark it is poorly seen, so it was simply not possible to have a human's eyes further apart, but a mechanical aid had to be devised, the rangefinder, there were two main ways of doing it at the end of the 19th century. optically and through the depression, this last option was only really useful in land-based coastal defenses and had nothing to do with the use of officers who had a particularly bleak outlook on life, but rather had to do with trigonometry, when less so after some initial experiments.

That turned out to be somewhat difficult and unreliable when determining its results. You would mount a scope of some type with a known focal range at a fixed height above the sea. Then you would look at the target, focus your sight so you could see it clearly and read. the focal length of the telescope and the vertical angle you had used, this gave you the hypotenuse of a right triangle, as well as two of the angles, the angle of depression of your telescope and a right triangle that was the intersection of where you were with the C since you already knew the short length of the triangle, which was the height at which the scope was mounted above the C, you could then use a set of pre-calculated fixed tables to calculate the longest length, which was therefore the range. then you would adjust the curvature of the earth, the state of the tide and then fire your gun.

Ideally the projectile would land on or near the target and you could make corrections, but this only worked when the height between the observer and the C was known. Quite accurately when actually at sea on a ship that was pitching and in At any given time it would have a variable freeboard and draft, this information was not possible to acquire in real time, making the method useless, the optical method was much more promising for ships. in the sea this exploited the same trick that our brain uses for calculations of short distances but because it is a machine it was much simpler to separate the two eyes or reference points further in this increase in the length of the base between observations and also naturally increase apparent angles. between the two observations and therefore a more distant object could be observed and the range calculated accurately because the difference in viewing angles was still significant enough to calculate a good result, obviously the wider the lenses and prisms, the longer the range could be calculated. and the more accurate readings would be obtained at closer ranges, for example, much later, at the Battle of Jutland, ships that were equipped with wider-based rangefinders would be observed to consistently show more accurate fire than ships with more accurate rangefinders. short and although the ranges in question were theoretically within the capabilities of either system, the technical limitation was manufacturing precision, since even the smallest error in the prisms, lenses, tube, various gears, etc It would be significantly amplified if it had to be propagated over a considerable length, such as Let's say a 20 or 30 foot wide rangefinder still needed a human to operate these systems and there were two main ways to make this technology work: matching and stereoscopic methods.

The matching method works by having a very fine optical prism at each end of the rangefinder mounted by default to look absolutely forward when you point the rangefinder at the target because of the distance between the two prisms, the two images they project are obviously in places slightly different, effectively, what you actually see before your brain compensates in yournormal vision in In the coincidence rangefinder, these two images are presented superimposed on top of each other or, in most naval examples, the top half of one image is placed on top of the bottom half of the other, causing the two halves appear displaced, since this difference is easier for humans. eye to adapt and also easier for the brain to recognize slight differences compared to two completely overlapping images, the other method devised a little later actually projected the same top half of the image from both prisms with one inverted at the bottom as It was felt that perhaps this common element would help alignment even more now that the operator had to turn an offset dial that adjusted the angle of a lens that was contained in one of the arms, this changed the angle of the projected image and so he moved it through the eyepiece.

The operator would continue to adjust this dial until the two halves of the image are aligned. This recreates the same situation as the depression rangefinder, except it is flipped 90 degrees on its side. Now the known base length of the rangefinder is the short edge of a 90 degree triangle and the two angles at this point, neither obviously 90 degrees, the other being whatever angle the compensating lens dial tells you just to adjust. Using the compensating lens also has the added advantage of not having to adjust the angles of the delicate prisms and lenses at each end of the rangefinder and you are simply rotating a relatively small and virtually corrected orienting lens into the system itself now, using the formulas of the sine and cosine, you can calculate the length of the hypotenuse and the long edge of your 90 degree triangle and the latter, the long edge is the range to the target because this relationship is a known set of mathematical values.

A simple gear dial could be attached to the offset dial that could immediately tell him what range he had set without having to consult a table in a book. So, although the system itself only needs a viewing lens, some of the most common naval rangefinders, such as the bar and Stroud set, which met a good portion of the Royal Navy's needs during the early part of the century XX, included a second viewing lens that holds this dial arranged so that the operator can see and read on the range as he adjusts the view on the scope, the system would prove to be relatively simple and robust and users of decent film cameras of 35 millimeters will also be familiar with exactly how this system works, but it had its weaknesses: it depended on the human ability to marry. common reference points and could therefore be confused by making the ship's outline very irregular, hence the strange triangles that appeared briefly on all British ships in the First World War and of course the accuracy was based in a steady hand of the operator and a sufficient distance between the lenses so that only a specific angle of compensation would give an aligned image rather than a range of similar angles if the entire tube were expanded or contracted with both heat and cold, this too would change throughout the readings, as the distance from the base would change and of course, a vibration could alter the alignments of the prism or make it impossible to distinguish a clear image.

Also, for fairly obvious reasons, it wasn't brilliant against fast-moving targets that jump a lot or are particularly difficult to track, such as airplanes, the alternative method. It was the stereoscopic rangefinder, now exploiting considerably more of the human eye and brain in its innate functions and the coincidence rangefinder by effectively acting as a way of widening the space between the observers eyes directly to assist this, identical markings were placed on each lens at each end of the rangefinder, these would serve as reference points, the observer would then look through two eyepieces, one attached to each lens and prism, and see two slightly different images of the target, the brain would automatically adjust them to form a single clear image of the target as if the brain wanted to do so, assuming of course that the operator had 20/20 vision, now the markings would come into play due to the brain's habit of matching identical images aligned to form a 3D image, although the brain would also try to do that. line up these marks on a single image and the rangefinder now took advantage of a trick you can try yourself if you have two points next to each other on a sheet of paper that have been separated so that one eye cannot see the other point, like a a piece of cardboard or something, then bring the paper close enough to your face and try to relax and look into the distance, your brain will think that it is actually seeing a single object at different angles and then it will project a single point at a certain distance While you can focus on it, it may take a few minutes to get this working now if you do it with another pair of points slightly further apart on the same piece of paper, the two individual points projected as you focus will appear to be at different distances again because now you are fooling the brain of course, in reality both sets of points are on the same piece of paper at the same distance, while in the rangefinder the target is at a distance that is what you want to find and the marks on the lenses They are fixed, but because of this illusion effect, the brain will merge the marks and project them at an obviously false distance.

This distance can be determined before battle by calibrating the system. Now, if these two apparent distances are different, the brain can focus. on one or the other, but not both, and the one not being focused will appear blurred or duplicated, so the operator can adjust a compensation dial similar to the matching rangefinder until it is possible to focus on both marks, which are usually a Diamond. The shape and the lens at the same time now the apparent range of the markings matches the actual range of the lens and using the precalibrated figures built into the compensating dial the range can be determined by the amount of angle the lens had to be adjusted.

To get the marks to focus at the same apparent range as the targets, this system was not vulnerable to breaking the contour of the ship with jagged devices, in fact, doing so with this system actually provides more reference points for the brain to calculate. how to do it is actually easier to hit the target in certain aspects and can also be used more easily against fast moving targets such as aircraft as you can just zoom out and then track quite easily as you don't need to manually align the images , just turn the dial to make sure everything stayed in focus and they had their eyes down, although the operator required excellent vision to begin with and of course had to constantly switch between in and out of focus images, a bit like someone will constantly hit you in the face with multiple different eyeglass prescriptions. every few seconds, while desperately trying to concentrate on a fixed object, understandably this led rather quickly to massive ice tension and an absolutely raucous migraine sooner or later, although some people were better suited to this particular role than others , unlike the matching system, the wider the rangefinder, the better the results, although a wider base on your rangefinder meant a narrower specific field of focus, which then meant more strain on the operator, even an operator trained would usually need some relief after about 15 to 20 minutes of constant use, assuming they were To start with, I was in pretty good shape due to the stereoscopic system that relies on the brain and some quick fingers to do most of the hard work, it was somewhat faster to use directly from the starting gate compared to a matching rangefinder, assuming the same competency of the operators, but would suffer a much faster deterioration in accuracy as the operator wore out.

It was also somewhat more vulnerable to distractions that could automatically draw the operator's attention, and of course needed someone with near-perfect visual focus, while the matching rangefinder could be used even by someone with quite a bit of experience. strong prescription glasses and once the range was established, making corrections via the dial was a simple and consistent process, at least while aiming at something like a boat, so all that meant that whatever choice of rangefinder you used could now work or work. find out how far away your enemy was, but that wasn't the end, it wasn't him at the beginning of the end, although it might be the end of the beginning of your efforts to hit the enemy, it was relatively simple to mount a rangefinder on a rotating pedestal that reads the angles of a circle and this could be used to give an orientation to the target in relation to the ship, although one of us could also be used separately to do this, it was advisable to have this device mounted and ideally on top of it the rangefinder, if you were to use a separate unit, as if the angle difference between a device that might be only six feet wide and a larger one, obviously, could be much wider, could give you an accurate range, and then place a heading observation unit on another place. along a ship that was several hundred feet away would give a somewhat different bearing than used in the rangefinder observations, giving an inaccurate shot unless compensated for, adding an additional and frankly unnecessary layer of complication to all You must also provide a second set of angles if you were taking the data from a rangefinder separate from the guns, this was sometimes known as beta angle and was a slight adjustment that needed to be made per track to account for because the range and the heading were for the rangefinder itself, while the gun was, as mentioned above, possibly a few hundred feet away and would therefore need a slightly different heading and range which fortunately could be determined manually or mechanically from of a fixed set of tables such as the relative one.

The turret and rangefinder position usually didn't change again unless something had gone horribly wrong, and at that point the range and heading data were probably the least of their worries. Of course, you could get around this difference by mounting the rangefinder directly on the turret, and in fact many battleships carried these devices, however the turrets were considerably lower than somewhere like, say, the top of the turret. bridge or the top of the main mast, and mounting a rangefinder in that position was generally better because you could see further from a vantage point. point and also tended to be closer to the ship's center of rotation, so these separate, higher fire control positions would tend to be a ship's primary rangefinders, at least until they were the primary method of communication between them. and the turrets. was disabled now of course you might be concerned that a large vulnerable system made of delicate optics could be put out of commission in battle so you would provide additional rangefinders this could take the form of additional main fire control positions or perhaps secondary fire control positions. which could have a similar sized or perhaps slightly smaller rangefinder spread throughout the ship and as we mentioned many main battery turrets and in some cases secondary battery turrets would also carry their own range measuring systems , the size of these systems was partially a function. of weight because once they reached fairly substantial sizes, they could weigh quite a bit and, as we've covered in many other videos, having large weights high up on the boat hurts its stability, but also the ranges it was actually going to achieve. operate would dictate to some extent the size of rangefinder you are going to use at least once the initial batch of rangefinders have been issued and have started to expand in size for obvious reasons if you are going to use a rangefinder for your main battery which will have to be quite large because hopefully it will fire at a fairly long distance, its secondary battery, which, unless it is the central base, is out of range of its main battery, obviously it only needed to fire at a much closer distance and, therefore he didn't need the expense or weight of an extremely large range, as long as he could settle for a small one and his anti-aircraft batteries would fire closer again, so he could settle once again for a smaller rangefinder and of course , a smaller rangefinder is lighter so you can have more, maybe even one per main anti-aircraft installation or several anti-aircraft fire control directors and being smaller and lighter could also be moved. them much faster, which was quite important when tracking a moving targetquickly, like a plane, there were many different ways of doing it, the Royal Navy officer using coincidence rangefinders, the Germans in the marina using a stereoscopic rangefinder in World War II and several others.

Navies that use one or, in the case of the Italians, both, in addition to several turret-mounted rangefinders, the layout of the main battery rangefinders can be analyzed by looking at some relatively well-known ships, for example in the Bismarck class . There were two secondary fire control positions with rangefinders, one forward and one aft, and there was the primary fire control position also with a rangefinder that was on top of the main mast, so you actually had three, although the units Fore and aft due to its position is not a full 360° line of sight and therefore could only be used for the front and rear turrets respectively, but as we mentioned, the Italians decided they wanted to use both the rangefinder stereoscopic as well as coincidence, so the Latorre o-- are a wonderful example.

Of how many rangefinders can be found on a 1930s warship, the Latorre class generally carried a total of 24 rangefinders, although Latura, being special, carried 26 in several different positions and obviously of different sizes, there were six 12 meter wide rangefinders. located in three paired facilities, also known as duplex facilities, and each of these facilities contained a 12-meter base-matching rangefinder and a 12-meter stereo pace rangefinder. Each of these installations was present at the rear of one of the main turrets and there were obviously three turrets. There was also in what is sometimes called the wedding cake fire control position atop the famous main mast, another duplex installation, this one with a seven-point, seven-foot base that was installed in what is basically the center of the three levels.

There was also a 7.2 meter single stereoscopic. rangefinder which was placed at the bottom of the three tiers and this was apparently used for targeting more general objects that the admiral or captain also wanted to measure rather than the direct gunnery of the main battery that the rest of us used. What I just mentioned were dedicated in some way, so with eight separate rangefinders all dedicated in some way to calculating the range of the main gun batteries, it is perhaps a little more understandable now how the Latoya managed to achieve very long distances. precise. and ranges almost consistently during its time in the Second World War, it is a shame that the quality of the projectile meant that the version was not able to exploit the fast and accurate range that each of the triple secondary turrets on the Latoya were capable of. which there were There were four that had their own 6.3 meter base stereoscopic rangefinder and there were two more five meter base duplex systems, so again it's a coincidence and a stereoscopic system that was mounted in fire control positions that were designed to control the secondary battery as a whole.

There were two more three-meter Zin stereoscopic rangefinder fire control positions for the 19-millimeter anti-aircraft guns, a three-meter random reserve stereoscopic rangefinder near the base of the main mast, and four two-meter x' base stereoscopic rangefinders that were incorporated into walkable directors for the lighter weapons and here artisanal Latorre or as we mentioned had two additional ones that were joined at the base of the three meters in the front of the ship to Yes, that was a lot of optics, so after all, now you have the range to shoot and the heading to train your weapons well, except you don't see that there are two other important factors that come into play at stake: one, the fact that everything is moving and the atmosphere in the latter part, at least in the period 1900 to 1950, could not be measured in any meaningful way, while the local air temperature, pressure , humidity levels, wind direction, etc., could be read at least towards the end of the period with the relative degree of reliability.

The simple fact was that at any significant distance these conditions could be completely different both at the target and at various points in between, the projectile would also travel high in the air in a ballistic arc before descending and conditions at different altitudes would also affect the trajectory. . In a way, you also had to adapt to the curvature of the Earth and all this meant that even for two completely static targets, between these factors and various slight inaccuracies in the calibration and manufacturing of the fire control systems, the chances of a Impact in the first round were basically zero, so corrections would be required after the first salvo, although the extent to which a given projectile was affected by these atmospheric conditions would vary significantly depending on the weapon and the projectile's profile in terms of velocity. , mass and angle, a high-velocity 15-inch projectile coming at a shallow angle, for example, would be much less affected than a low-velocity and obviously lighter 11-inch projectile traveling through an arc much higher, so that, at least in the classical period of battleships, the atmosphere and movement of part and part could only be partially compensated. that could be offset to a much greater degree and this would, however, require these services from a fire control system that included a central fire director and a fire control computer.

The reason for the central fire director was simple with the first salvo practically guaranteed. failed, he needed enough shots landing to give a rough idea of ​​where his aiming point had actually been in relation to the target's actual location. One projectile was not enough. Variations in the weapon, the projectile, the charge or any other number of factors, including the atmosphere. could cause it to go very far or away from the aiming point and you would have no way of knowing that two projectiles were almost as bad as even if one of them was in the target of your actual aiming point, which of course it wouldn't.

There was no guarantee because both could be completely off balance and there would be no way to know which one was on target, even if there was one, three was better since the chances of two out of three shots being dramatically off target were low, but it was still possible. . because it was considered ideal for the period in question for the most part, as a single rogue value would be obvious against the three that were on target and even if two of them were out, they would probably be out by different amounts, allowing the least at least the other two that were on target to be measured at worst if you're four shots were completely all over the place on the first battleships which had eight to ten gun volleys that still left another half salvo available for try again or a couple more tries if you had a ship with a twelve gun barrage, alternatively on these ships with a high number of guns you could fire a half salvo with more guns, in that particular case six to give more points The director's data also allowed him, in theory, to aim all the weapons he wanted at the same point and fire them at the same time, either completely remotely or by providing a single set. common data to all weapons to follow manually or some hybrid in between, this was important to ensure that the same set of circumstances was affecting all the various projectiles in the particular half salvo warfighting salvo, as while the cannons are firing, it looks very impressive, of course, the exact location, speed, temperature and atmosphere.

The conditions surrounding the ship would vary from second to second, so an undulating mass of fire looks spectacular and isn't tremendously useful in determining whether you're going to hit the target or not. Meanwhile, the fire control computer was the center that tied together all the information that was being collected and that would pass a final set of ranges, elevations and headings to the weapons, this was not a computer as one might understand now, these devices They were initially purely mechanical and later electromechanical rather than electronic. i.e. all the calculations were done using shifter and alarm shaft systems and an interesting form of clockwork and the electrical part was usually there just to provide the driving force, the reason these devices were needed was that, although any individual made a calculation for the Various factors that had to be taken into account could be relatively quick and easy to solve.

Doing so, for each and every calculation that needed to be done, would take an entire room of people long enough for the result to be useless when they finished it and need to start over, especially since many calculations needed the participation of others to performed or depended on each other to give a final result. Meanwhile, a fire control computer could do all of this for you almost instantly and better. some could also be updated to varying degrees based on the values ​​entered initially, saving some time when calculating fire control information for the next salvo. So, what factors should these mechanisms take into account and why?

Well, let's go briefly. In a non-exhaustive list, some of these factors would have their own instrumentation, such as in klonoater, to collect the relevant data to feed and also note that some of the early systems were not able to account for or at least accurately account for some of these. factors partly due to the limitations of the device itself and partly due to the limitations of the instrumentation, which would continue to advance during the first half of the 20th century first and there was its speed and this must be taken into account because anything on the ship , including projectiles, would be moving forward at ship speed and therefore a projectile fired at a target, if it were aimed, theoretically true, would actually land slightly ahead of the aiming point because it would have a bit of horizontal impulse this would require. taking into account the speed of the enemy to produce an overall speed difference which would then give a final correction to the guns that would take them slightly ahead or slightly behind the initial aiming point set by the rangefinders depending on the relative speeds of the two ships second.

Their relative heading was not strictly dependent on their northward alignment, although this comes into play in another factor which we will discuss later, but rather referred largely to the effect of their heading in relation again to the cannons themselves, as if their If the guns were pointed at 90 degrees to one side or the other and you were going in a straight line, this is effectively the same as calculating your speed for factor one, but if you were sailing away from the target, you would be importing a slight negative speed into the projectiles. which would then cause them to fall slightly short without correction, the opposite was true if you got closer to the target and these relative changes in speed depended on the speed input, as the relative angular and ground speed factors depended on the speed. general of your ship and again the heading of the enemies in relation to you would also be a factor not fun right angle triangle trigonometry third your turning speed this was important obviously as turning meant that your heading and possibly your speed would constantly change In addition to adding inertia to your projectiles, since they and the rest of the ship would generally try to continue in the same direction as you, before, if you were turning, the turrets would also have to rotate at a certain speed relative to your turning speed to being able to keep the cannons pointed at whatever point it is aimed at, so all this would also induce several changes in the aiming point.

Fourth turn, the ship would normally be rolling to a certain extent and of course a gun aimed at a certain angle would find this angle absolute. Switching with roll, there were a couple of ways to deal with this later on, you could have a motorized system that used gyroscopes and motors to keep the weapons at the same angle relative to the horizontal, you could keep the weapons at a fixed angle and measure the angle of the ship as it turns, which was more common in the early parts of the 20th century. In this case you would set the actual pointing angle of the guns to take into account your target and again there are several ways to do this; could calculate the total angle upwards. or downward speed imparted during a turn and for guns mid-turn with an aiming angle corrected to take this into account.

Oh, you could wait until the ship reaches the apex or thenadir of its function when, in theory, the projectiles would have a neutral speed caused by the roll, assuming, of course, that you can react quickly enough to fire at that particular point, because there is a vertex or an idea of ​​​​the role, you would have to adjust the angle proportionally or you could simply set an acceptable amount. of spin-induced velocity and setting the guns to fire only when the velocity due to spin fell below this, regardless of where in the spin it actually was, and of course these various methods are on a sliding scale of accuracy versus allowing you to fire more than once in a blue moon, number five is a pitch-like roll; this imposed changes in the speed of the shells as the ship rose and fell, and more than rolling, it could also impose changes in height above the guns which, of course, could cause a shell to go off. short or long or to the left or to the right, if the ship's course was significantly deviated from parallel with the target, this was more of a dead end, since compensating at the top or bottom of a pitch has the change of relative velocity most neutral with respect to the projectile, but the greatest The change in height and the offset of half a pitch has the smallest change in height but the greatest change in velocity to take into account.

Note that in this case a best fit calculation may be necessary as obviously the pitch of the ship will be affecting different turrets in different ways at the same time in number six we have temperature this is both gun and air where you can measure them for the weapon this affects the tendency of the weapon to fall also slightly affects the combustion speed of the charge and therefore the amount of energy imparted to the projectile the grip that the weapon exerts on the projectile and other factors because obviously the metal of the gun will expand very slightly as it heats up and for the air temperature this affects both the initial temperature of the gun, as a gun that has been baking quite happily in the equatorial Pacific, will be significantly warmer in the first shot than a gun that you just knocked a bunch of ice off because you're running in the middle of an arctic convoy and other factors associated with air temperature, such as air density and extreme updrafts, can also slightly affect the overall size of the gun and projectile, so again, if you are in the middle of a Pacific summer at the equator, your projectile and your gun will have expanded very slightly, leading to a slightly tighter fit. , whereas if you're on arctic convoy duty, both the gun and the projectile will have been minutely shrunk, which will mean the fit will be a little looser and that's a bit of a pain. 22 because well, the projectile will move up the gun a little more easily, but at the same time it opens up the possibility of very slight breaches in the seal, which obviously there are other physical factors to take into account, such as the conductive band. on projectiles, but that's a completely separate system that we won't discuss here, but suffice it to say that while these expansions and contractions may seem minuscule to the naked eye, when you're shooting at a target that's potentially over a dozen miles away , can generate a There is a big difference in the number seven, there are levels of humidity.

Moist air is obviously a little denser than dry air, at least as far as the projectile is concerned, because it hits a lot of water molecules, so a projectile fired in a very humid atmosphere will travel. a fraction shorter in distance than an identical projectile fired in very dry air again, this change may only be slight, but when in terms of distance, assuming you are shooting at a side target, the depth of your target could be five hundredths to a thousandth of the distance. having your shell actually cover even these small factors can throw your aim off very quickly because let's face it, you only have to miss by a fraction of a meter and you've missed naval artillery rarely awards medals because almost number eight is aerial in general. pressure than air pressure will of course offer more resistance or less resistance and depending on their relative level, but again this can introduce small errors in general and all of these factors, although to some extent they may depend on each other, can also work completely separately. lines so you can have low pressure dry cold air or high pressure humid warm air or whatever variable there, you also have to take into account the number nine wind speed and this is actually quite big as it can affect all aspects. of a projectile's flight, a headwind will obviously reduce the range of a projectile, a tailwind will increase it, a crosswind will force the projectile to deviate from its course and a wind at any point other than those four 90 degree points will impart aspects of all of these effects to the projectile with all of these environmental factors that we mentioned above, they can also vary.

At different points and altitudes along the course of the projectiles, the wind may be twenty knots from the east where you are, it may be ten knots from the west where the target is, and it may be 20 knots from the north a mile away. the atmosphere through which their projectiles will pass, etc. Without much more recent technology, it was only possible to adjust the values ​​that could actually be measured from the ship itself in its local environment and perhaps some of them were obviously visible and were in other places, for example if it had a coverage shift influence low during For example, your rangefinders could see that perhaps your target ship's flags were pointing on a slightly different course and with passes that somewhat less or more energy compared to yours, reaching number 10 was the enemy's speed, now you had to lead your Buy as if shooting, we are a moving enemy at the time of shooting, then in the 20 or 40 seconds it took for the projectile to reach the typical battlefields, they will no longer be there, so calculate how fast they are. going and therefore where they would be almost a minute in the future, assuming they didn't change course, was quite important.

This, of course, also influenced the relative speed between the two ships we discussed at the beginning of this list. 11 and the heading and heading of the enemy and again this reports the relative change in distance between the ships and the absolute change in location for the target, a close target obviously sees a projectile aimed at its previous location go far even if it corrects for it by speed and vice versa so this will need to be adjusted as well and like enemy speed this would also report a relative change in position between ships as this can cancel out or exacerbate differences depending on the two sets of data and the number 12, the speed of the enemy.

This would of course inform how the previous two points would change moment to moment, as well as take into account the speed of the target to produce a probable location of the point for the target in the future, which was basically just an additional linear extrapolation for more complexity. , the last three factors would of course interact with the same factors that were on board your own ship as we mentioned and this would create an ever-varying correction in your crosshairs. It should be noted that taking all three into account for your own ship and for the enemy ship and giving a sensible result was something that only later fire control systems were able to do and there are thirteen of them.

Earth's rotation projectiles travel a long enough distance in naval gunfights and spend enough time in the air to require a taking into account the fact that the Earth and anything more directly linked to it, such as oceans and ships, it will move slightly when the shell arrives. Now you need to use the latitude of these ships because then you can compensate for the relative speed. of the Earth at your location, but you must also take into account your heading relative to true north. I remember we mentioned that early on because whether the Earth's rotation would throw its shells very short or side to side also depended on their relative position. angle with the direction of the Earth's rotation, so all of these corrections would be introduced wherever possible, as I said, given the limitations of the available instruments and the fire control computer, into a final corrected data set that would be would send to the cannons once the first projectiles were launched. sent observations on where they had landed compared to where they were expected to land would be sent along with any updates to all previous factors that might have arisen since the weapons were fired and a new position was calculated in the next salvo or half would be fired. save and hopefully you would land your projectiles a little closer and so on until you hopefully hit something.

There were now ways to speed up the process, for example if you fired two half volleys, one up and one up. one slightly below what I thought the data provided said, this would give you a quick idea of ​​where the errors are because I say you probably don't expect the tachi hit with your first sight; Alternatively, you could opt for what we call ladder shots where you would walk a series of small projectiles with your elbows along a series of ranges again to try to get at least one closer to the target, at which point a fire could be opened. faster and hopefully more precise to maximize impacts in minimal time, now that early systems were relatively slow. in some cases, with manual crank and only a limited number of the inputs mentioned above can be used;

For example, some systems would give you a prediction, but you would have to enter all the settings again to get a new prediction, whereas more modern units might still work. track that could be updated on the fly, likewise many early units could only operate in direct linear motion if your ship or the enemy ship changed course you would have to start the calculations over with your new vector data to As time went by, electric power was introduced. more systems allowing for more advanced calculations as well as new instruments providing new data and of course more processing power, radar would of course eventually offer extremely accurate heading and range data and assuming it was working and calibrated well, In addition to providing constant updates on what the enemy was doing, the history of the exact mechanics of some of these systems, such as the Drea table, the Mark 1 fire control system, the Admiralty fire control table and the like, were These will be discussed in more detail at another time, but suffice it to say that while at the beginning of the First World War, something as simple as the enemy moving away would mean that the entire system had to be reset and start again from scratch.

At the end of World War II, the most advanced systems would, in theory, allow you to do a figure 8 on your battleship and still maintain a reasonable fire control lock all the time, obviously the exact location and level of Protection afforded to these delicate fire control instruments were somewhat important when it came to the ship's design, a large number of crew were needed to operate them. and well, with the best will in the world, they are quite delicate instruments, they don't react well to intense projectile fire, well, humans don't react very well to intense projectile fire either, so double reason to protect them, but, of course, again and forever.

The higher they were on the ship, the more weight this would add and putting even more protection on them would only increase the weight and decrease stability even further, so the fire control systems were relatively vulnerable even if the fire control computer could be taken. real fires and place it in a relatively protected location, it depended on inputs from several delicate instruments and these could not be protected to a relatively large degree, for example, with your rangefinders, you physically need those lenses to be able to see, you can see the rest of some manner. of putting that box together like you would actually do with rangefinders mounted on the back of the turrets, but at the end of the day, if a splinter breaks that lens on that prism, it's an action thing and you can't really protect it that well. against that type of fire, that's why redundancy was so important as we talked to the Latour EO class and this extended to the fire control director systems and the fire control computers as well, from what we've already seen with this brand they had one primary and two secondary systems and with other ships such as, for example, Vanguard, there could even be cases where the entire primary fire control system was completelyduplicate, so you could destroy one of them completely and the other would just take over as if nothing had happened. happened and of course at the end of the day if all those systems were destroyed all methods of communication between them and the turrets were cut off, the turrets had their own rangefinders and in some cases they would have smaller versions of this type of fire . control systems that would not in turn allow them to calculate some of this data, but the lesser nature of these systems would of course mean less accurate fire and generally could only be used for the turret they were particularly associated with, for which again for example, in the final battle of the Bismarck, once the primary fire control system has been destroyed, the accuracy of the Bismarck's fire decreases and then once the bow and stern control stations as well have been demolished, turrets operating under local control have very little chance. of hitting anything now none of this of course addresses anti-aircraft fire control systems which have their own set of problems to deal with because it's a much more 3D environment and you also have to be, by design, in positions much more exposed with much greater free range of 3D movement, so at some point in the distant future I suppose we will address the anti-air issue of our control systems, but for the moment, although this has taken about an hour, I hope this provides some degree of clarity as to how complex it actually is to take a projectile on a warship and launch it across the ocean to, ideally, intersect an enemy warship several dozen miles away, so with that we will end here.

Thank you very much for listening to us and I hope to see you again. in another video, that's all, thanks for watching. If you have a comment or suggestion for reviewing a boat, let us know in the comments below, don't forget to comment on the pinned post for dry docking questions.