US Navy Fire Control Systems - How They Really Work

Pinned post for Q&A :)

Sometimes someone forgets not just how old computers are, but how complex calculation they could do.

I remember reading that while the US battleships were still in service, a great deal of research was done on eliminating gun dispersion with computerised models and the best sensors available, but it turned out to be an intractable problem - some dispersion was inevitable.

Drach and New Jersey - the greatest collab to come out of the 2020s.

Stuff like this is so technical and nerdy and it's freaking awesome.

After finding your channel a year ago I finally got a video that's only an hour old! It's taken me a year to catch up. Drach I absolutely love the work you do and if not for your channel I never would have found the battle ship New Jersey channel. WW 2 engineering and the family history of service to our great country is in my heart. Thank you for sharing your passion and knowledge!!!

Periscope has a great film breaking down analog computation and fire control computers so that even a math-phobe like me can understand. Thanks for this Drach!

On vacation at the beach, just about the lay down and this drops. Life is good right now. Thanks for making my day Drach!

1:11:11 Battleship Texas Fire Control: "Hurry up with the abacus! Chief Wardzynski needs to carve the solution into his clay tablets!"

In "The Night The Giants Rode" over at Unauthorised, Bill relates that he was trained on the Submarine equivalent as a young officer. And that when they got the electronic computers instead of the analogue ones; the latter did not have enough computing power to achieve the same precision.

Awwwwwwww!!!!! I like telling my guests on WISKY that the computer was built Ford tough ;-).

I swear, the fact a handful of YT contributors can produce better historical content than most professional organisations says it all . Drachinfel, Mark Felton, Lazerpig, History of Everything, Animarchiy. They constantly produce better content than any ‘professional’ organisation of the last few years.The fact that all of these guys are given any funds is all you need to know.

A friend's father was an ensign aboard a Gearing class DD near the end of WWII. They were testing a new fire control computer prototype on a deserted island near Cuba one day. Unfortunately, there was a bug in the computer. Instead of averaging the rangefinder results, the computer added them together. They missed the island. Thank goodness for QA...

when the Iowas were last in service, the Mk13 radar was the oldest extant radar in the navy still in use.

I'm at 2:31 and am going to make an educated guess about how fire control systems worked. Drach has another video somewhere on the basics, so I have an idea. If we start at the simplest setting, where we have two battleships sailing on steady, parallel courses, you need five things: your speed, their speed, a tabulized chart of shell flight times (or an equation to approximate that), the range, and the distance from the rangefinder to each turret. Once you have that, you can set up a differential equation to find a solution where the enemy ship's location intersects your shells, then set up an bunch of triangles to make sure each turret is at the correct angle to hit at the point you're aiming at. You might not even need a diff. eq. for the shell-ship calculation, but you will for more complex calculations. Once you have those things, you should be able to fire and, ignoring temperature and wind differences (because WW2 technology couldnt accurately measure that downrange, anyways), you should hit.

Something to enjoy with my coffee this morning, so awesome.

After visiting the USS North Carolina, I always wondered how they used the analog/mechanical fire control computer. Thank You. I had to make a major move of my house, but I am still trying to find out more on the sail plan I wrote of before. Again, Thank You!

Behold: something we can never engineer again, nor operate correctly! Amazing what our grandparents and great-grandparents were able to do with a slide rule, graph paper, and a chalkboard.

Never knew that about the Lunar landings. Fascinating (best Spock impression).

I can only imagine the absolute complexity and intensity ofthe constantly changing calculations at Jutland,by both sides.No calculators, aswe know them. Just mechanical and a bunch of brainiacs working as fast as they could. Amazing.