Fire control computer

A fire-control system is a number of components working together, usually a gun data computer, a director, and radar, which is designed to assist a weapon system in hitting its target. It performs the same task as a human gunner firing a weapon, but attempts to do so faster and more accurately.

An early use of fire-control systems was in bomber aircraft, with the use of computing bombsights that accepted altitude and airspeed information to predict and display the impact point of a bomb released at that time. The best known United States device was the Norden bombsight.

Simple systems, known as lead computing sights also made their appearance inside aircraft late in the war as gyro gunsights. These devices used a gyroscope to measure turn rates, and moved the gunsight's aim-point to take this into account, with the aim point presented through a reflector sight. The only manual "input" to the sight was the target distance, which was typically handled by dialing in the size of the target's wing span at some known range. Small radar units were added in the post-war period to automate even this input, but it was some time before they were fast enough to make the pilots completely happy with them.

By the start of the Vietnam War, a new computerized bombing predictor, called the Low Altitude Bombing System (LABS), began to be integrated into the systems of aircraft equipped to carry nuclear armaments. This new bomb computer was revolutionary in that the release command for the bomb was given by the computer, not the pilot; the pilot designated the target using the radar or other targeting system, then "consented" to release the weapon, and the computer then did so at a calculated "release point" some seconds later. This is very different from previous systems, which, though they had also become computerized, still calculated an "impact point" showing where the bomb would fall if the bomb were released at that moment. The key advantage is that the weapon can be released accurately even when the plane is maneuvering. Most bombsights until this time required that the plane maintain a constant attitude (usually level), though dive-bombing sights were also common.

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