Shoot for the magic trunk!PART 2: https://youtu.be/E3p_Cv32tEoTechnology Connextras (the second channel where I put stuff sometimes)https://www.youtube.com/@...
First, wear your dust mask. Who knows where these machines have been?
The old firing computers from WW2 are cool as hell.
Not just analog, but mechanical analog.
They take 25 inputs, some of which come directly from the spotter scope things, some from the ship itself, and then controls the guns directly.
It’s all cams, gears, reciprocating whatsits and stuff.
And because it’s analog, there is no quantisation, rounding errors, floating point errors. It’s continuously and instantly calculated.
Very cool stuff. https://youtu.be/s1i-dnAH9Y4
The older I get, the more I appreciate things like this, what is basically 19th century mechanical engineering, and what those geniuses were able to do with it. Like fly planes through WWII.
IIRC, when they were looking at refitting the Iowa class ships in the late 70s/early 80s, they found that while they could make the mechanical fire control computers smaller, they couldn’t make them any more accurate.
I mean, that’s 40 years ago.
I can understand that their mechanical abilities had peaked, and weren’t able to improve on it.
It would be curious to test that against a modern CNCd mechanical analog firing computer, and then test THAT against a modern 128-bit fixed/floating point computer.
I imagine the computer would win
The old firing computers from WW2 are cool as hell.
Not just analog, but mechanical analog.
They take 25 inputs, some of which come directly from the spotter scope things, some from the ship itself, and then controls the guns directly.
It’s all cams, gears, reciprocating whatsits and stuff.
And because it’s analog, there is no quantisation, rounding errors, floating point errors. It’s continuously and instantly calculated.
Very cool stuff.
https://youtu.be/s1i-dnAH9Y4
Wow, thanks for the link.
The older I get, the more I appreciate things like this, what is basically 19th century mechanical engineering, and what those geniuses were able to do with it. Like fly planes through WWII.
IIRC, when they were looking at refitting the Iowa class ships in the late 70s/early 80s, they found that while they could make the mechanical fire control computers smaller, they couldn’t make them any more accurate.
I mean, that’s 40 years ago.
I can understand that their mechanical abilities had peaked, and weren’t able to improve on it.
It would be curious to test that against a modern CNCd mechanical analog firing computer, and then test THAT against a modern 128-bit fixed/floating point computer.
I imagine the computer would win