Computers were initially developed during World War 2 to solve projectile motion problems.?

Can anybody help me cite projectile-motion based situations during World War 2 where you think these computers were used?Computers were initially developed during World War 2 to solve projectile motion problems.?WW II was really the first war where ships fought each other beyond visual range and even at night. Allied battleships used RADAR to locate enemy ships. Crude computers were used to solve the ballistic equations and direct the shells on target.Computers were initially developed during World War 2 to solve projectile motion problems.?Analogue computers were developed during world war two for naval gunnery and areal bombardment.





'... The Bofors 40 mm gun (called a fire unit) used in its anti-aircraft role has the M5 director for its fire-control system. The director is operated by a member of the Range Section who reports to the chief of section, who in turn reports to the platoon commander. The range section's leader is also called a Range Setter; he guides the preparation of the director and generator for firing, verifies the orientation and synchronisation of the gun and the director, and supervises fire control using the M5 director (or by the carriage when the M7 Weissight is used). The range section that uses the M5 director consists of the range setter, elevation tracker, azimuth tracker, power plant operator and telephone operator.



The M5 director is used to determine or estimate the altitude or slant range of the aerial target. Two observers then track the aircraft through a pair of telescopes on opposite sides of the director. The trackers turn handwheels to keep the crosshairs of their respective telescope on the aircraft image. The rotation of the handwheels provides the director with data on the aircraft's change in elevation and change in azimuth in relation to the director. As the mechanisms inside the director respond to the rotation of the handwheels, a firing solution is mechanically calculated and continuously updated for as long as the target is tracked. Essentially, the director predicts future position based on the aircraft's present location and how it is moving.



After their introduction, directors soon incorporated correction factors that could compensate for ballistic conditions such as air density, wind velocity and wind direction. If the director was not located near the gun sections, a correction for parallax error could also be entered to produce even more accurate firing direction calculations.



Directors transmit three important calculated firing solutions to the anti-aircraft gun firing crew: the correct firing azimuth and quadrant elevation calculated to determine where exactly to aim the gun, and for guns that use ammunition with timed fuzes, the director also provides the flight time for the projectile so the fuze can be set to detonate in close proximity to the target.



Early anti-aircraft artillery battery located the directors in the middle of the position, with the firing sections (guns) located at the corners of the position. Before the introduction of radars which have largely replaced directors, searchlights were used in conjunction with directors to allow night target engagement. ...( 1 )'





'... The Norden sight was designed for use on US Navy aircraft by Carl Norden, a Dutch engineer educated in Switzerland who emigrated to the US in 1904 and worked on bombsights at the Sperry Corporation before starting his own company. The Norden was later adopted by the USAAF. The Norden was initially built at the Norden plant in New York City before the start of WWII and then at several other companies during the war, with a wide variety of different versions being built, all with minor differences.



The complete Norden system consisted of two primary parts, the stabilizer and the sight head. The stabilizer was a gyroscopically leveled platform that gave the sight head a stable base from which to work. The stabilizer was also normally attached to the aircraft's autopilot, allowing it to direct the aircraft back to the same level point as the sight head. The sight head had to be carefully aligned to the stabilizer in order to ensure it was looking in the same direction as the aircraft heading.



The sight head contained the main operational portions of the bombsight. It consisted primarily of three parts, a mechanical analog computer that calculated the impact point of the bombs relative to the aircraft as an angle, a small telescope used as the primary sight, and a system of electric motors and gyros that moved the telescope so a single point on the ground remained stationary in the sight. Early examples of the Norden included an "Automatic Gyro Leveling Device" to keep the sight head level with the stabilizer, but this proved to be difficult to maintain and was removed from most examples in the field, replaced by a simple bubble level.



The system was operated by pointing the telescope out in front of the aircraft in order to acquire the target while still approaching it. Many Nordens were equipped with a reflector sight to aid in this step. Once turned on, the motors in the sight head would attempt to keep the telescope pointed directly at the selected target, slowly rotating the telescope towards the vertical as the aircraft approached the target. Since the rate of change in the angle depended on the distance to the target and the speed of approach, the bombardier dialed in estimates for airspeed and altitude, which could be read fairly accurately from the aircraft's instruments.



Providing an accurate groundspeed was one of the sources of improved accuracy the Norden provided compared to contemporary instruments. Groundspeed cannot be measured directly from the aircraft, at least not until the introduction of various radar devices, so it had to be calculated by measuring the known airspeed and using a calculated windspeed. The Norden itself was used to make a direct measurement of the groundspeed. During the final approach to target the bombardier would select an easily visible test target and turn the bombsight on with its default settings. Since the aircraft had no information about the windspeed, the test target would drift across the eyepiece as the aircraft moved away from the calculated point. The bombardier then adjusted the sight using a separate set of fine-tuning dials that could be operated by feel while looking through the eyepiece, using them to adjust the drift rates until the target stopped moving in the eyepiece. The dials then held an accurate measurement of windspeed, which could be used for the rest of the bomb run. This was a much more accurate measurement than could be provided by the navigator's drift telescope or dead reckoning.



Once the bombsight was readied and the aircraft was on final approach, the system was turned on and took control of the aircraft's autopilot. From that point on, the bombsight actually flew the aircraft, attempting to keep it on the chosen path and correcting for any last-minute adjustments provided by the bombardier. At the proper moment it automatically dropped the bombs; the aircraft was moving over 350 feet per second (110 m/s), so even minor interruptions in timing could dramatically affect aim.



In the European theater, the US introduced an Automatic Flight Control Equipment (AFCE) and a radar system called the H2X (Mickey), which were used directly with the Norden bombsight. The AFCE served as the mechanical computer “autopilot” of the plane. The radar proved most accurate in coastal regions, as the water surface and the coastline produced a distinctive radar echo. ...( 2 )'



'... By the start of World War II, aircraft altitude performance had increased so much that anti-aircraft guns had similar predictive problems, and were increasingly equipped with fire-control computers. The main difference between these systems and the ones on ships was size and speed. The early versions of the High Angle Control System, or HACS, of Britain's Royal Navy were examples of a system that predicted based upon the assumption that target speed, direction, and altitude would remain constant during the prediction cycle, which consisted of the time to fuze the shell and the time of flight of the shell to the target. The USN Mk 37 system made similar assumptions except that it could predict based upon a constant rate of altitude change. The Kerrison Predictor is an example of a system that was built to solve laying in "real time", simply by pointing the director at the target and then aiming the gun at a pointer it directed. It was also deliberately designed to be small and light, in order to allow it to be easily moved along with the guns it served.



Simple systems, known as lead computing sights also made their appearance inside aircraft late in the war. These devices used a gyroscope to measure turn rates, and moved the gunsight's aim-point to take this into account. The only manual "input" to the sight was the target distance, which was typically handled by dialing in the size of the target's wing span at some known range. Small radar units were added in the post-war period to automate even this input, but it was some time before they were fast enough to make the pilots completely happy with them.



The United States Navy deployed the Mark I Fire Control Computer on many of its vessels constructed during World War II. ...( 3 )'



Follow the highlighted links within these Wikipedia articles and you should be able to find numerous other examples.