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"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 |
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