Pursuit guidance is a form of guidance widely used in older ground attack missiles.
In pursuit guidance, the missile is steered so that the velocity vector of the missile always points at the target, i.e. it has always the direction of the line of sight. In the early days of guided missiles where the computers were analog this was an easy implementation in the hardware. It found particular use in the early laser-guided bombs with the aerodynamically stabilized birdies on the front of the bomb. The birdies sit on a universal joint and thus will point in the direction of the relative wind. If the laser receiver is placed on this wind stabilized reference, the angle that the laser is off the wind vector is the same as is measured relative to the centerline of the seeker. Thus, the angle is constructed easily in analog hardware.
Famous quotes containing the words pursuit and/or guidance:
“It wounds a man less to confess that he has failed in any pursuit through idleness, neglect, the love of pleasure, etc., etc., which are his own faults, than through incapacity and unfitness, which are the faults of his nature.”
—William Lamb Melbourne, 2nd Viscount (1779–1848)
“If Los Angeles has been called “the capital of crackpots” and “the metropolis of isms,” the native Angeleno can not fairly attribute all of the city’s idiosyncrasies to the newcomer—at least not so long as he consults the crystal ball for guidance in his business dealings and his wife goes shopping downtown in beach pajamas.”
—For the State of California, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)