XPost: rec.arts.comics.strips
From: bliss-sf4ever@dslextreme.com
On 10/16/25 09:00, Paul S Person wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Oct 2025 22:00:02 -0400, Cryptoengineer
> wrote:
>
>> On 10/15/2025 4:30 PM, William Hyde wrote:
>>> Mark Jackson wrote:
>>>> On 10/15/2025 10:34 AM, Scott Dorsey wrote:
>>>>> Scott Dorsey wrote:
>>>>>> Paul S Person wrote:
>>>>>>> IIRC, at some point Galileo was in charge of the Pisan
>>>>>>> artillery.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> I wonder if he was trying to find out why their "time on target"
>>>>>>> computations [1] never worked with Aristotle's view of how
>>>>>>> things fell.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> _Two New Sciences_ has a discussion of this and is well worth
>>>>>> reading. Note that Galileo is thinking throughout of bodies
>>>>>> attracted to the earth and never makes that great jump of
>>>>>> Newton's.
>>>>>
>>>>> I take that back. I thought there was a discussion of time of
>>>>> flight but looking it up I find there is not.... it would be
>>>>> difficult to do without the calculus I suspect.
>>>>
>>>> Probably not. Did they know the muzzle velocity of the devices to
>>>> which a given distance/angle table applies? Then, assuming no
>>>> meaningful impact of air resistance:
>>>>
>>>> time-to-target = distance divided by (muzzle velocity)*cos(angle).
>>>>
>>> I seem to recall from Aubrey that one of Elizabeth's scholars applied
>>> mathematics to gunnery, possibly Dr Dee before he became an occultist.
>>>
>>> The Parliamentary officer Nathaniel Nye directed cannon in the English
>>> civil war and published a book on the mathematics of it in 1647, in
>>> which he cited a much earlier Italian mathematician, Tartaliga, who
>>> wrote on the subject in 1537.
>>>
>>> William Hyde
>>
>> "Time on target" involves firing several projectiles, setting the
>> propellent charges, firing times, and elevation of the cannon(s)
>> to cause the shells to arrive at the target simultaneously.
>>
>> I've seen this done using cannon that have liquid propellants
>> and computer control. I can't imagine it being done with fixed
>> charges, or without computers, save as the result of a careful
>> iterative set of firings to zero on on the charges, timing and
>> elevations needed.
>
> While researching the history of "time on target", I found a Wikipedia
> article asserting that it was developed by the Brits in North Africa
> in 1941 or 1942.
>
> Fixed charges I don't know about, but computers (if you mean modern
> digital computers) they did not have.
>
> OTOH, a book I purchased, /The Effects of Nuclear Weapons/, has a sort
> of circular slide rule that /could/ be considered a computer of such
> effects. So some such "computer" might have been involved.
>
> And then developed further by the Americans as the war progressed.
Reliable tables for Time to Target waited on better means of time
measurement calculations.
The more reliable tables for aiming were developed around the time of
the US
Civil War. The computers of WW II at the beginning were still people
but by the end
of the war work was underway on electronic computers vaccum tubes and
relays to
be replaced as soon as transistors had been developed a few years later.
Then too the development of RADAR improved Anti-Aircraft fire as well as
helping to locate invading aircraft.
>
>> Please remember that Aubrey makes sh*t up.
>
> So do lots of people. We live in an age when "skepticism" is not
> restricted to the paranormal, or religion, but extends to everything.
But people have been making up stories because children have
been asking questions since people learned to talk. The primitive results
from the stone age perhaps are religion and the modern stories are what
we call science perhaps grounded in some aspects of perceptable reality.
Oh yes. The skeptics of religion are still persecuted but the skeptics
of science especially vaccine science will succumb in the future plagues.
bliss
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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