41–46 of 46 posts
Does the Trolley problem apply here? (i.e. diverting the enemy from your town, if you know it is likely they will just attack the next town over) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
I wanted to know if this was plausible, so I located the Yawata Steel Works (the source of the smoke screen) and the Kokura Arsenal (the aiming point for the bomb) on a map. They were about 4.4km apart. http://i.imgur.com/nJaJtH7.png (the site of the Steel Works is on the left) Interesting, but I still don't know if it's true. edit: Wikipedia's page on Smokescreens says "One 50 gallon drum of fog oil can obscure 60 m…
97 square kilometers? 97 kilometer radius ? tsk tsk Wikipedia…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would imagine a pretty decent one if you want any kind of precision when you're 10km up in the air. You need to take your own ground speed into consideration, as well as the windspeed as the bomb is going to be in free fall for around 3/4 of a minute. Getting your ground speed would have been a real pain since you would have to have calculated it from your indicated air speed and guessed at the air density and wind…
You just need one reference point to measure your groundspeed, and you don't have to know what it is, you can just pick any arbitrary feature below you. With a known altitude, measuring the angular velocity of a ground feature gives you your groundspeed. There were mechanical systems available by the 1920s or 30s that could do this automatically, perhaps most famously the Norden bombsight: http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…
_Over Japan, bomber crews soon discovered strong winds at high altitudes, the so-called jet streams, but the Norden bombsight worked only for wind speeds with minimal wind shear. Additionally, the bombing altitude over Japan reached up to 9,100 metres (30,000 ft), but most of the testing had been done well below 6,100 metres (20,000 ft). This extra altitude compounded factors that could previously be ignored; the shape and even the paint of the bomb mantle greatly changed the aerodynamic properties of the weapon, and, at that time, nobody knew how to calculate the trajectory of bombs that reached supersonic speeds during their fall_
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You just need one reference point to measure your groundspeed, and you don't have to know what it is, you can just pick any arbitrary feature below you. With a known altitude, measuring the angular velocity of a ground feature gives you your groundspeed. There were mechanical systems available by the 1920s or 30s that could do this automatically, perhaps most famously the Norden bombsight: http://en.wikipedia.org/wik…
That's a fascinating article. It does mention that they weren't particularly useful though: _Over Japan, bomber crews soon discovered strong winds at high altitudes, the so-called jet streams, but the Norden bombsight worked only for wind speeds with minimal wind shear. Additionally, the bombing altitude over Japan reached up to 9,100 metres (30,000 ft), but most of the testing had been done well below 6,100 metres (…