Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!texsun!sun-barr!rutgers!att!cbnews!military
From: military@att.att.com (Bill Thacker)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: U S torpedo defense
Message-ID: <6490@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 12 May 89 02:47:17 GMT
References: <6318@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Sender: military@cbnews.ATT.COM
Lines: 34
Approved: military@att.att.com



From: military@att.att.com (Bill Thacker)
>They must be there to shoot at something, but you need someone who can aim!
>...
>After nearly 1 hour of shooting at the raft at ranges from 100 yrds to 1/4 
>mile, the raft was still afloat. It suffered only a couple of hits...
>The combination of poor training, motion of the ship and motion of the 
>raft resulted in a rather disappointing demonstration...

Tsk tsk, one would hope that the "gunnery revolution" of the beginning
of the century hadn't been forgotten *quite* so completely! :-)

For those who don't know what I'm referring to, the standard of naval
gunnery circa 1900 was abysmal.  In particular, standard practice was
to point the gun more or less correctly and then wait for the ship to
roll into the right position to line up the sights.  This sounds okay
in theory but works very poorly in practice.  The "gunnery revolution"
was started by a Royal Navy captain (whose name I have forgotten, dammit)
who happened to observe a natural "gunlaying genius" practicing in
weather rough enough that everyone else had long since given up.  The
trick is to correct for wave motion instead of waiting for it, so that
the gun is stable with respect to the horizon.  This requires a fair
amount of exertion with a heavy gun (we aren't talking about 50-cal
here, but about hefty naval guns) and considerable practice, but the
results are spectacular.  The accuracy of naval gunnery improved by
(literally) several orders of magnitude within a few years.

(Well, I should admit that compensation techniques weren't the only
factor involved.  Another was a massive shift in emphasis away from
the polish of the paint and towards the accuracy of the gunnery.)

                                     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
                                 uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu