The Dreadnought Project

tone · Site Admin Joined: 29 Oct 2004 Posts: 488 Location: Boston

I hope to work on a few of these myself, and to invite a few select others to contribute. Ideally, I will come up with some way to tie each article to a BBS thread so that corrections and ideas and questions can be posed and answered or otherwise incorporated into an improved article.

I have two I am shaping up, dealing with ballistics and range tables.

http://dreadnoughtproject.org/essays/

tone

Harley · Joined: 23 Oct 2005 Posts: 131 Location: Great Britain

Interesting information, Tone. "Special Guest Essays and Essayists" - nice idea. You've made a good start, that's for sure.

Simon

Horsa · Joined: 09 Dec 2005 Posts: 32 Location: England

Good move, Tone. I look forward to others . :D

I was talking with John Hopkin (Floater) recently and we were debating atmospheric temperature as a possible factor. Unless I missed it in my skim, I didn't see any reference in your essay. Is this because it was either insignificant or even non-existent.

tone · Site Admin Joined: 29 Oct 2004 Posts: 488 Location: Boston

I forget most of what I learned about this stuff as I went along. I intend at some point to tear out my present atmospheric model in favor of the standard atmospheric model (google it) with a tweak or two if it suits me.

The thing I learned in studying range tables is that they are NOT what I thought they were. I THOUGHT they were strings of spline-interpolated data hung between 10 or so test firing tentpoles, but in fact they are strings of spline-interpolated values hung between 6 tentpoles whose height and spacing are ball-parked after a rather jumbled and indirect analytical bonfire sparked by a whopping four meaned test firing series. In essence, that is 4 de-noised firings -- not even enough to take down the Clantons and McLaurys at the OK Corral.

Talk about an education! I believe that there is not a single row in the range table book that corresponds to a cleaned-up single real test firing. Not one.

That doesn't mean the range table ceases to be valuable. It IS still the most authoritative source available on the subject it covers. But it means that it is foolish to attempt to make a physics-centric simulation regurgitate an exact copy of these tables, as they themselves correspond to an approximation of the weapon system. Any time I can get a carte blanche pass to avoid a spiral into minute complexity is an "out" to savor.

tone