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Blue Boar (bomb)
The Vickers Blue Boar was a family of British air-launched television-guided glide bombs of the 1950s which was cancelled during development. A key role was as an anti-shipping missile, using its guidance system to attack the moving targets. It would also replace unguided bombs between against point targets, or be equipped with a nuclear warhead. A smaller version was also developed for testing. The name is a randomly assigned rainbow code. The goal of the system was to allow the bomb to be guided to of its target after being dropped from a jet bomber flying at altitude. It could manoeuvre at up to 3.5G so that it could quickly be aimed after breaking through cloud cover as low as . Nuclear-armed versions were primarily intended to provide the launching aircraft with some stand-off range and avoid overflying the target, gliding about from the launch point. In this role, guidance using H2S radar instead of the television camera was considered. Development was cancelled when i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vickers
Vickers was a British engineering company that existed from 1828 until 1999. It was formed in Sheffield as a steel foundry by Edward Vickers and his father-in-law, and soon became famous for casting church bells. The company went public in 1867, acquired more businesses, and began branching out into military hardware and shipbuilding. In 1911, the company expanded into aircraft manufacturer, aircraft manufacture and opened a flying school. They expanded even further into electrical and railway manufacturing, and in 1928 acquired an interest in the Supermarine. Beginning in the 1960s, various parts of the company were nationalised, and in 1999 the rest of the company was acquired by Rolls-Royce Holdings, Rolls-Royce plc, who sold the defence arm to Alvis plc. The Vickers name lived on in Alvis Vickers, until the latter was acquired by BAE Systems in 2004 to form BAE Systems Platforms & Services, BAE Systems Land Systems. History Early history Vickers was formed in Sheffield ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Barnes Wallis
Sir Barnes Neville Wallis (26 September 1887 – 30 October 1979) was an English engineer and inventor. He is best known for inventing the bouncing bomb used by the Royal Air Force in Operation Chastise (the "Dambusters" raid) to attack the dams of the Ruhr Valley during World War II. The raid was the subject of the 1955 film '' The Dam Busters'', in which Wallis was played by Michael Redgrave. Among his other inventions were his version of the geodetic airframe and the earthquake bomb. Early life and education Barnes Wallis was born in Ripley, Derbyshire, to Charles William George Robinson Wallis (1859–1945) and his wife Edith Eyre Wallis née Ashby (1859–1911). He was educated at Christ's Hospital in Horsham and Haberdashers' Aske's Hatcham Boys' Grammar School in southeast London, leaving school at seventeen to start work in January 1905 at Thames Engineering Works at Blackheath, southeast London. He subsequently changed his apprenticeship to J. Samuel White's ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gloster Meteor
The Gloster Meteor was the first British jet fighter and the Allies of World War II, Allies' only jet aircraft to engage in combat operations during the Second World War. The Meteor's development was heavily reliant on its ground-breaking turbojet engines, pioneered by Frank Whittle and his company, Power Jets, Power Jets Ltd. Development of the aircraft began in 1940, although work on the engines had been under way since 1936. The Meteor first flew in 1943 and commenced operations on 27 July 1944 with No. 616 Squadron RAF. The Meteor was not a sophisticated aircraft in its aerodynamics, but proved to be a successful combat fighter. Gloster's 1946 civil Meteor F.4 demonstrator ''G-AIDC'' was the first Aircraft registration, civilian-registered jet aircraft in the world. Several major variants of the Meteor incorporated technological advances during the 1940s and 1950s. Thousands of Meteors were built to fly with the RAF and other air forces and remained in use for several decade ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Video Camera Tube
Video camera tubes were devices based on the cathode ray tube that were used in television cameras to capture television images, prior to the introduction of charge-coupled device (CCD) image sensors in the 1980s. Several different types of tubes were in use from the early 1930s, and as late as the 1990s. In these tubes, an electron beam was scanned across an image of the scene to be broadcast focused on a target. This generated a current that was dependent on the brightness of the image on the target at the scan point. The size of the striking ray was tiny compared to the size of the target, allowing 483 horizontal scan lines per image in the NTSC format, 576 lines in PAL, and as many as 1035 lines in Hi-Vision. Cathode ray tube Any vacuum tube which operates using a focused beam of electrons, originally called cathode rays, is known as a cathode ray tube (CRT). These are usually seen as display devices as used in older (i.e., non-flat panel) television receivers and computer d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bandwidth (signal Processing)
Bandwidth is the difference between the upper and lower frequencies in a continuous band of frequencies. It is typically measured in hertz, and depending on context, may specifically refer to ''passband bandwidth'' or ''baseband bandwidth''. Passband bandwidth is the difference between the upper and lower cutoff frequencies of, for example, a band-pass filter, a communication channel, or a signal spectrum. Baseband bandwidth applies to a low-pass filter or baseband signal; the bandwidth is equal to its upper cutoff frequency. Bandwidth in hertz is a central concept in many fields, including electronics, information theory, digital communications, radio communications, signal processing, and spectroscopy and is one of the determinants of the capacity of a given communication channel. A key characteristic of bandwidth is that any band of a given width can carry the same amount of information, regardless of where that band is located in the frequency spectrum. For example, a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Microwave
Microwave is a form of electromagnetic radiation with wavelengths ranging from about one meter to one millimeter corresponding to frequencies between 300 MHz and 300 GHz respectively. Different sources define different frequency ranges as microwaves; the above broad definition includes both UHF and EHF (millimeter wave) bands. A more common definition in radio-frequency engineering is the range between 1 and 100 GHz (wavelengths between 0.3 m and 3 mm). In all cases, microwaves include the entire SHF band (3 to 30 GHz, or 10 to 1 cm) at minimum. Frequencies in the microwave range are often referred to by their IEEE radar band designations: S, C, X, Ku, K, or Ka band, or by similar NATO or EU designations. The prefix ' in ''microwave'' is not meant to suggest a wavelength in the micrometer range. Rather, it indicates that microwaves are "small" (having shorter wavelengths), compared to the radio waves used prior to microwave te ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Multipath Distortion
In radio communication, multipath is the propagation phenomenon that results in radio signals reaching the receiving antenna by two or more paths. Causes of multipath include atmospheric ducting, ionospheric reflection and refraction, and reflection from water bodies and terrestrial objects such as mountains and buildings. When the same signal is received over more than one path, it can create interference and phase shifting of the signal. Destructive interference causes fading; this may cause a radio signal to become too weak in certain areas to be received adequately. For this reason, this effect is also known as multipath interference or multipath distortion. Where the magnitudes of the signals arriving by the various paths have a distribution known as the Rayleigh distribution, this is known as Rayleigh fading. Where one component (often, but not necessarily, a line of sight component) dominates, a Rician distribution provides a more accurate model, and this is known as Rician ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Westbury, Wiltshire
Westbury is a town and civil parish in the west of the English county of Wiltshire, below the northwestern edge of Salisbury Plain, about south of Trowbridge and a similar distance north of Warminster. Originally a market town, Westbury was known for the annual Hill Fair where many sheep were sold in the 18th and 19th centuries; later growth came from the town's position at the intersection of two railway lines. The busy A350, which connects the M4 motorway with the south coast, passes through the town. The urban area has expanded to include the village of Westbury Leigh and the hamlets of Chalford and Frogmore. History A Romano-British settlement was found at The Ham, in the north of the parish, in the 1870s. The manor of Westbury, and the hundred with the same boundaries, was held by the king at the time of the Domesday survey in 1086. The Wiltshire Victoria County History recounts the fragmentation into manors, and traces their ownership. The ancient parish included B ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Circular Error Probable
In the military science of ballistics, circular error probable (CEP) (also circular error probability or circle of equal probability) is a measure of a weapon system's precision. It is defined as the radius of a circle, centered on the mean, whose perimeter is expected to include the landing points of 50% of the rounds; said otherwise, it is the median error radius. That is, if a given munitions design has a CEP of 100 m, when 100 munitions are targeted at the same point, 50 will fall within a circle with a radius of 100 m around their average impact point. (The distance between the target point and the average impact point is referred to as bias.) There are associated concepts, such as the DRMS (distance root mean square), which is the square root of the average squared distance error, and R95, which is the radius of the circle where 95% of the values would fall in. The concept of CEP also plays a role when measuring the accuracy of a position obtained by a navigati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gyroscopic
A gyroscope (from Ancient Greek γῦρος ''gŷros'', "round" and σκοπέω ''skopéō'', "to look") is a device used for measuring or maintaining orientation and angular velocity. It is a spinning wheel or disc in which the axis of rotation (spin axis) is free to assume any orientation by itself. When rotating, the orientation of this axis is unaffected by tilting or rotation of the mounting, according to the conservation of angular momentum. Gyroscopes based on other operating principles also exist, such as the microchip-packaged MEMS gyroscopes found in electronic devices (sometimes called gyrometers), solid-state ring lasers, fibre optic gyroscopes, and the extremely sensitive quantum gyroscope. Applications of gyroscopes include inertial navigation systems, such as in the Hubble Space Telescope, or inside the steel hull of a submerged submarine. Due to their precision, gyroscopes are also used in gyrotheodolites to maintain direction in tunnel mining. Gyroscopes can ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Blue Danube (nuclear Weapon)
Blue Danube was the first operational British nuclear weapon. It also went by a variety of other names, including Smallboy, the Mk.1 Atom Bomb, Special Bomb and OR.1001, a reference to the Operational Requirement it was built to fill. The RAF V bomber force was initially meant to use Blue Danube as their primary armament at a time when the first hydrogen bomb had not been detonated, and the British military planners still believed that an atomic war could be fought and won using atomic bombs of similar yield to the Hiroshima bomb. For that reason the stockpile planned was for up to 800 bombs with yields of 10-12 kilotons. V-bomber bomb bays were sized to carry Blue Danube, the smallest-size nuclear bomb that was possible to be designed given the technology of the day (1947) when their plans were formulated. Design Initial designs for the Blue Danube warhead were based on research derived from Hurricane, the first British fission device (which was neither designed nor employed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Smiths Group
Smiths Group plc is a British, multinational, diversified engineering business headquartered in London, England. It operates in over 50 countries and employs 14,600 staff. Smiths Group has its origins in a jewellery shop, ''S Smith & Sons'', which was founded by the watchmaker and businessman Samuel Smith. Supplying its precision watches to various clients, including the Admiralty, the business quickly grew and expanded into a major provider of timepieces, diamonds and automotive instrumentation. On 21 July 1914, the business became a public limited company, holding onto this status for over a hundred years. Throughout much of the twentieth century, Smiths Group was the principal supplier of instruments to the British motorcar and motorcycle industries, organising itself as ''Smiths Industries'' Ltd in 1960. Its main activities now are the manufacture of sensors that detect and identify explosives, products and services for the major process industries, products that connect, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
