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Fire-control
A fire-control system (FCS) is a number of components working together, usually a gun data computer, a Director (military), director, and radar, which is designed to assist a ranged weapon system to target, track, and hit a target. It performs the same task as a human Crew-served weapon, gunner firing a weapon, but attempts to do so faster and more accurately. Naval based fire control Origins The original fire-control systems were developed for ships. The early history of naval fire control was dominated by the engagement of targets within visual range (also referred to as indirect fire, direct fire). In fact, most naval engagements before 1800 were conducted at ranges of . Even during the American Civil War, the Battle of Hampton Roads, famous engagement between and was often conducted at less than range. Rapid technical improvements in the late 19th century greatly increased the range at which gunfire was possible. Rifled guns of much larger size firing explosive shell ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Director (military)
A director, also called an auxiliary predictor, is a mechanical or electronic computer that continuously calculates trigonometric firing solutions for use against a moving target, and transmits targeting data to direct the weapon firing crew. Naval warships For warships of the 20th century, the director is part of the fire control system; it passes information to the computer that calculates range and elevation for the guns. Typically, positions on the ship measured range and bearing of the target; these instantaneous measurements are used to calculate rate of change values, and the computer ("fire control table" in Royal Navy terms) then predicts the correct firing solution, taking into account other parameters, such as wind direction, air temperature, and ballistic factors for the guns. The British Royal Navy widely deployed the Pollen and Dreyer Fire Control Tables during the First World War, while in World War II a widely used computer in the US Navy was the electro-mecha ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arthur Pollen
Arthur Joseph Hungerford Pollen (13 September 1866 – 28 January 1937) was an English journalist, businessman, and commentator on naval affairs who devised a new computerised fire-control system for use on battleships prior to the First World War. His most important technical innovation was one of the world's first electrically-powered analogue computers, patented as the Argo Clock: a differential analyser which enabled big guns to engage with long-range targets when both ships were moving at speed in different directions. Early life Pollen was born on 13 September 1866, the sixth son and eighth child of eight sons and two daughters born to John Hungerford Pollen and Maria Margaret Pollen. His father being a leading convert to Catholicism along with Cardinal Newman, Arthur was educated at the school which the latter founded in Birmingham, The Oratory School (1878–1884). He then went up to read Modern History at Trinity College, Oxford where he gained a second-class degr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Analog Computer
An analog computer or analogue computer is a type of computer that uses the continuous variation aspect of physical phenomena such as electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic quantities (''analog signals'') to model the problem being solved. In contrast, digital computers represent varying quantities symbolically and by discrete values of both time and amplitude (digital signals). Analog computers can have a very wide range of complexity. Slide rules and nomograms are the simplest, while naval gunfire control computers and large hybrid digital/analog computers were among the most complicated. Complex mechanisms for process control and protective relays used analog computation to perform control and protective functions. Analog computers were widely used in scientific and industrial applications even after the advent of digital computers, because at the time they were typically much faster, but they started to become obsolete as early as the 1950s and 1960s, although they rem ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Jellicoe, 1st Earl Jellicoe
Admiral of the Fleet John Rushworth Jellicoe, 1st Earl Jellicoe, (5 December 1859 – 20 November 1935) was a Royal Navy officer. He fought in the Anglo-Egyptian War and the Boxer Rebellion and commanded the Grand Fleet at the Battle of Jutland in May 1916 during the First World War. His handling of the fleet at that battle was controversial. Jellicoe made no serious mistakes and the German High Seas Fleet retreated to port, at a time when defeat would have been catastrophic for Britain, but the public was disappointed that the Royal Navy had not won a more dramatic victory given that they outnumbered the enemy. Jellicoe later served as First Sea Lord, overseeing the expansion of the Naval Staff at the Admiralty and the introduction of convoys, but was relieved at the end of 1917. He also served as the Governor-General of New Zealand in the early 1920s. Early life Jellicoe was born on 5 December 1859 in Southampton, Hampshire. Jellicoe was the son of John Henry Jellicoe, a capta ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rangekeeper
Rangekeepers were electromechanical fire control computers used primarily during the early part of the 20th century. They were sophisticated analog computers whose development reached its zenith following World War II, specifically the Computer Mk 47 in the Mk 68 Gun Fire Control system. During World War II, rangekeepers directed gunfire on land, sea, and in the air. While rangekeepers were widely deployed, the most sophisticated rangekeepers were mounted on warships to direct the fire of long-range guns.Technically, it would be more accurate to use the term "rifle" for long-range ship-board cannon. However, the term "gun" is commonly used and that nomenclature is maintained here. These warship-based computing devices needed to be sophisticated because the problem of calculating gun angles in a naval engagement is very complex. In a naval engagement, both the ship firing the gun and the target are moving with respect to each other. In addition, the ship firing its gun is not a s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rangefinders
A rangefinder (also rangefinding telemeter, depending on the context) is a device used to measure distances to remote objects. Originally optical devices used in surveying, they soon found applications in other fields, such as photography and in the military. They were specially useful for finding the range of a target, such as in naval gunnery and anti-aircraft artillery. The word ''telemeter'' is derived . Designs The first rangefinder telemeter was invented by James Watt in 1769 and put to use in 1771 in surveying canals. Watt called his instrument a micrometer, a term now used with a different meaning in engineering (the micrometer screw gauge). It consisted of two parallel hairs in the focal plane of a telescope eyepiece crossing an upright hair. At the point to be measured, two sliding targets on a surveyor's rod were adjusted to align with the hairs in the telescope. The distance to the rod could then be determined from the distance between the targets on the ro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Arthur Knyvet Wilson
Admiral of the Fleet Sir Arthur Knyvet Wilson, 3rd Baronet, (4 March 1842 – 25 May 1921) was a Royal Navy officer. He served in the Anglo-Egyptian War and then the Mahdist War being awarded the Victoria Cross during the Battle of El Teb in February 1884. He went on to command a battleship, the torpedo school and then another battleship before taking charge of the Experimental Torpedo Squadron. He later commanded the Channel Fleet. He briefly served as First Sea Lord but in that role he "was abrasive, inarticulate, and autocratic" and was really only selected as Admiral Fisher's successor because he was a supporter of Fisher's reforms. Wilson survived for even less time than was intended by the stop-gap nature of his appointment because of his opposition to the establishment of a Naval Staff. Appointed an advisor at the start of World War I, he advocated offensive schemes in the North Sea including the capture of Heligoland and was an early proponent of the development an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher
John Arbuthnot Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher, (25 January 1841 – 10 July 1920), commonly known as Jacky or Jackie Fisher, was a British Admiral of the Fleet. With more than sixty years in the Royal Navy, his efforts to reform the service helped to usher in an era of modernisation which saw the supersession of wooden sailing ships armed with muzzle-loading cannon by steel-hulled battlecruisers, submarines and the first aircraft carriers. Fisher has a reputation as an innovator, strategist and developer of the navy rather than as a seagoing admiral involved in major battles, although in his career he experienced all these things. When appointed First Sea Lord in 1904 he removed 150 ships then on active service which were no longer useful and set about constructing modern replacements, developing a modern fleet prepared to meet Germany during the First World War. Fisher saw the need to improve the range, accuracy and rate-of-fire of naval gunnery, and became an early proponent of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yaw Angle
The Euler angles are three angles introduced by Leonhard Euler to describe the orientation of a rigid body with respect to a fixed coordinate system.Novi Commentarii academiae scientiarum Petropolitanae 20, 1776, pp. 189–207 (E478PDF/ref> They can also represent the orientation of a mobile frame of reference in physics or the orientation of a general basis in 3-dimensional linear algebra. Alternative forms were later introduced by Peter Guthrie Tait and George H. Bryan intended for use in aeronautics and engineering. Chained rotations equivalence Euler angles can be defined by elemental geometry or by composition of rotations. The geometrical definition demonstrates that three composed ''elemental rotations'' (rotations about the axes of a coordinate system) are always sufficient to reach any target frame. The three elemental rotations may be extrinsic (rotations about the axes ''xyz'' of the original coordinate system, which is assumed to remain motionless), or intrins ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Calculating Machine
A mechanical calculator, or calculating machine, is a mechanical device used to perform the basic operations of arithmetic automatically, or (historically) a simulation such as an analog computer or a slide rule. Most mechanical calculators were comparable in size to small desktop computers and have been rendered obsolete by the advent of the electronic calculator and the digital computer. Surviving notes from Wilhelm Schickard in 1623 reveal that he designed and had built the earliest of the modern attempts at mechanizing calculation. His machine was composed of two sets of technologies: first an abacus made of Napier's bones, to simplify multiplications and divisions first described six years earlier in 1617, and for the mechanical part, it had a dialed pedometer to perform additions and subtractions. A study of the surviving notes shows a machine that would have jammed after a few entries on the same dial, and that it could be damaged if a carry had to be propagated over a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, (26 June 182417 December 1907) was a British mathematician, Mathematical physics, mathematical physicist and engineer born in Belfast. Professor of Natural Philosophy (Glasgow), Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow for 53 years, he did important work in the mathematical analysis of electricity and formulation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and did much to unify the emerging discipline of physics in its contemporary form. He received the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 1883, was its President of the Royal Society, president 1890–1895, and in 1892 was the first British scientist to be elevated to the House of Lords. Absolute temperatures are stated in units of kelvin in his honour. While the existence of a coldest possible temperature (absolute zero) was known prior to his work, Kelvin is known for determining its correct value as approximately −273.15 degrees Celsius or −459.67 degrees Fahrenheit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Malta
Malta ( , , ), officially the Republic of Malta ( mt, Repubblika ta' Malta ), is an island country in the Mediterranean Sea. It consists of an archipelago, between Italy and Libya, and is often considered a part of Southern Europe. It lies south of Sicily (Italy), east of Tunisia, and north of Libya. The official languages are Maltese and English, and 66% of the current Maltese population is at least conversational in the Italian language. Malta has been inhabited since approximately 5900 BC. Its location in the centre of the Mediterranean has historically given it great strategic importance as a naval base, with a succession of powers having contested and ruled the islands, including the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, Romans, Greeks, Arabs, Normans, Aragonese, Knights of St. John, French, and British, amongst others. With a population of about 516,000 over an area of , Malta is the world's tenth-smallest country in area and fourth most densely populated sovereign co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
