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Naval Technologies of the Great War

The videos on this page offer detailed studies of naval fire control systems from the World War I era.  Please download the video(s) to your desktop before playing (on Windows, right click the link and select "Save Target As...", on Macs, control+click the link for similar options).

This sort of study is fun to engage in, and a lively subject for learning of early computing and pure problem solving, whether you examine it from an historical, physical, or geometrical perspective.

Contact us for educational speaking opportunities or for technical consulting on a film or video project.

Videos
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  1. Aiming Torpedoes Accurately 14:47 32MB
  2. Aiming Torpedoes Accurately (part 2) 10:30 21MB
    A detailed analysis of a torpedo-aiming device in use by the Royal Navy in 1909. It assumes a familiarity with trigonometry and the concept of similarity in geometric shapes. The videos feature simulated torpedo firings to show how this clever device helped you put torpedoes on target.

    You can browse part of the primary source for these videos, the Royal Navy's Torpedo Manual of 1909 online.

  3. The Dumaresq 9:26 19MB
    A detailed description of a device invented in 1905 which helped determine the range rate and deflection given the speed and heading of own ship and target ship as well as its bearing. The video assumes a familiarity with vector addition and subtraction with a taste of coordinate spaces.
  4. Long Range Gunfire with the Dreyer Fire Control Table 28:00 85MB
    A rather rough "stand-in" movie to tide you over. I have been putting off this movie for a long time, owing to the complexity of the material covered. This chatty walk-through should give you an idea of how the Royal Navy computed trajectories for hitting targets at extreme ranges.
  5. Long Range Gunnery using Director Firing 31:00 96MB

    Also a rough cut, but I wanted to show that I have completed the outline of director control of gunnery.

  6. Illustration and Analysis of Gunnery Solution vs Reality 6:51  12.7MB

    This will be fairly confusing until I prepare a web page describing it, but this video offers an "eye in the sky" debrief of a firing exercise.  The ship to the north trailing a green wake and zig-zagging is the firing ship.  The ship steaming to the south on a course of due east is the target.  A translucent ship indicates where the Dreyer table's range pencil would be placing the target ship, and other markers indicate the range cuts and salvo patterns made during the action.  Enjoy!

Discussion and Questions

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Acknowledgements

  • Special thanks to Bill Jurens for his image of a sample range plot (seen in the Dreyer chapter)
  • Special thanks to Bill Schleihauf for his 3 part article on the Dreyer tables in Warship International (editions 1-3, 2001)
  • Thanks to INRO (publishers of Warship International) for permission to employ Bill Jurens' image as well as those of the Bearing Plot schematic and Mark V Dreyer Table images as they appeared in Bill Schleihauf's article series.