11–20 of 45 posts
If we lived in a peaceful world, building miniature missile systems to shoot down clay targets would be a hell of a hobby, but unfortunately, that seems like a bad idea given the ... world.
> Analog computers may seem to be "simple" or "like a toy computer", in fact they are powerful tools that were used during the 1950s and 1960s to design and test systems like ICBMs, supersonic aircraft and spacecraft. this is indeed a very interesting quote that we -dealing with digital- often tend to forget.
Not directly related, but brings to mind the training video for the fire control mechanical computers on US Navy ships: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1i-dnAH9Y4
David A. Mindell, "Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics" https://press.jhu.edu/books/title/1207/between-human-and-mac...
Absolutely epic book.
Not directly related, but brings to mind the training video for the fire control mechanical computers on US Navy ships: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1i-dnAH9Y4
ed-thelen.org is one of the most fascinating sites on the web to me, look around, its gigabytes and gigabytes of old missile tech. If we lived in a peaceful world, building miniature missile systems to shoot down clay targets would be a hell of a hobby, but unfortunately, that seems like a bad idea given the ... world.
Building a rocket with guidance would be pretty cool. But would probably get you on a government watch list!
So the short story is that the missiles were essentially radio controlled drones, radar measured the location of the target and the missile and from the ground the analog computer flies them together (or close enough that the bang will bring it down)
[1] What could possibly go wrong?