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Inside a Titan missile guidance computer

41–42 of 42 posts

Re: Inside a Titan missile guidance computer

#41

Post by chiph » Sun, Mar 22, 2020, 5:53 PM UTC

serf wrote: post #12

I'm surprised they opted to use a passively cooled power supply. I imagine it was much heavier than an equivalent active system. I guess MPG doesn't matter much on a Titan missile.

Once the liquid electrolyte was injected into the batteries and the missile powered up at launch time, it was only going to be operating for 30 to 40 minutes. So it didn't need a lot of cooling capacity.

Re: Inside a Titan missile guidance computer

#42

Post by timdierks » Mon, Mar 23, 2020, 11:53 AM UTC

sytelus wrote: post #37

The fascinating thing is that the Titan was completely inertially guided, i.e., no GPS or ground-based navigation. The high precision IMU + gyro send the computer acceleration and angular velocity and you integrate that over time to figure out where you are now. I'd think this would be very challenging and error-prone for inter-continental travel especially when the thing is planning to detonate nuclear war head. I w…

"Inventing Accuracy" is a fascinating history of ICBM inertial guidance. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/inventing-accuracy

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