B-29 computer guided turrets

"William Donzelli" wrote in message
om...
(Peter Stickney) wrote in message
...

All Gunners hy gyroscopic lead computing sights with stadiametric
ranging. As the Gunner tracked teh target, the gyroscopes measured
the rate of movement of the target in Azimuth and Elevation, The
Gunner would also track teh target in range, by using a "Motorcycle
throttle" type grip in the sight to size a ring of dots in the sight
picture to match the airplane's wingspan. Since the wingspan of an
attacking fighter would be known, or estimated slose enough, this
would give Range and Range Rate (Closing speed) information to hte
sight.

To add to this fine explanation, starting right around the beginning
of 1945, AN/APG-15 radars started making there way in B-29s. This was
a fairly small, cheap set that took much of the guesswork for figuring
range out of the gunners hands (although they could always go back to
the manual method, especially when the radars broke down).

True, but the radars were only installed on the B models during WWII,
meaning that they were largely limited to use by IIRC the 315th BW. The
remainder (and vast majority) of the Superfort fleet soldiered on with the
purely optical system. Note that the 315th BW is apparently the major source
of the oft-repeated apocryphal tale that all the B-29's had their guns
(except for tail mount) stripped and went into battle with reduced crews at
Lemay's behest; apparently that might have been the case for the 315th, or a
goodly portion of it, but little evidence exists that any of the other bomb
wings followed suit.

Brooks


--
William Donzelli