Coast Artillery Fire Control
In the United States, Coast Artillery fire control systems began to be developed at the end of the 19th Century and progressed on through World War II.
Early systems made use of multiple observation or base end stations (see Figure 1) to find and track targets attacking American harbors. Data from these stations were then passed to plotting rooms, where analog mechanical devices, such as the plotting board, were used to estimate targets' positions and derive firing data for batteries of coastal guns assigned to interdict them.
U.S. Coast Artillery forts bristled with a variety of armament, ranging from 12-inch coast defense mortars, through 3-inch and 6-inch mid-range artillery, to the larger guns, which included 10-inch and 12-inch barbette and disappearing carriage guns, 14-inch railroad artillery, and 16-inch cannon installed just prior to and up through World War II.
Fire control in the Coast Artillery became more and more sophisticated in terms of correcting firing data for such factors as weather conditions, the condition of powder used, or the Earth's rotation. Provisions were also made for adjusting firing data for the observed fall of shells. As shown in the figure at right, all of these data were fed back to the plotting rooms on a finely tuned schedule controlled by a system of time interval bells that rang throughout each harbor defense system.
It was only later in World War II that electro-mechanical gun data computers, connected to coast defense radars, began to replace optical observation and manual plotting methods in controlling coast artillery. Even then, the manual methods were retained as a back-up through the end of the war.
Read more about this topic: Fire-control System
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