SOME THEORY AND SUGGESTIONS ON ANTIAIRCRAFT MACHINE-GUN FIRE,
Abstract
The effectiveness of fire from manually-operated machine guns against fast, low-flying aircraft is notoriously poor - apparently because of a certain, still somewhat controversial, unsteadiness of the guns in the process of tracking. It is suggested that this effectiveness may be radically improved if development proceeds simultaneously along two lines. One of these lines is limited to such guns and is in the nature of human engineering; it concerns only the possibility of enabling the gunner to use the natural body technique of skeet-shooting, which seems so successful. The other line, which may have a wider application, concerns an hypothesis, here dubbed gyroscopics of tracking, for explanation of this unsteadiness. The claim is made that most gun-operating servomechanisms (including man) wrongly ignore, so to say, the full dynamics of the gun on its mount - and, faced with an unexpected response of the gun to the applied forces, become confused. Several methods are shown whereby the design of gun mounts can be altered in such ways that their dynamics will agree with the expectations of the servomechanisms. (Author)
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 1966
- Accession Number
- AD0817978
Entities
People
- Serge J. Zaroodny
Organizations
- Ballistic Research Laboratory