Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: Randy Larsen

It sounds a bit too much like the system used by the M109 155mm howitzer, with weather balloons and radiosondes.

By the time you’ve launched the weather balloons to get real-time information about upper and lower atmospheric winds, the bad guy has killed the hostage and gotten in a car across the border in Pakistan.


9 posted on 10/11/2010 12:10:41 AM PDT by MediaMole
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 4 | View Replies ]


To: MediaMole; All
“By the time you’ve launched the weather balloons to get real-time information about upper and lower atmospheric winds, the bad guy has killed the hostage and gotten in a car across the border in Pakistan.”

In actual use, we launch the radiosondes every two hours in order to keep real time data available to the artillerymen. The upper level winds that affect the artillery projectiles the most do not change very much minute by minute. Remember that the projectile effectively integrates the winds over the entire flight of the projectile, so relatively small variations of horizontal extent of a mile or so cancel themselves out.

The system that is probably at use here likely measures scintillation near the ground. Snipers already use it and speak of it as the “mirage” or heat shimmer near the ground. A sophisticated system can measure the scintillation and see how fast it is moving across the line from the the sniper to the target, thus deriving effective cross wind integrated over the entire range.

This has the potential of being very effective, but the difficulty has been in engineering a system small and light enough that does not require a receiver at the target end. This is theoretically possible, it has just been difficult to do.

16 posted on 10/11/2010 9:57:42 AM PDT by marktwain
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 9 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson