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Ah, thanks for your post. My day was long enough ago that we had Freddie FADAC for a battery computer, and did charts and darts as well. FADAC was slow, and a really good FDC could do the charts and darts faster. In those days, an FDC didn't fire (in training) unless the chart and FADAC were within a couple of mils deflection and 50m range. FADAC was faster with corrections, usually, but the first solution was often faster charts and darts. And in FAOBC, we spent more time in the gunnery department than anywhere else. No one graduated the course unless they could pass both charts and darts and fire direction. I knew guys who had to repeat the course because they flunked more than two shoots: no calibrated eyeballs, I guess. I taught survey and target acquisition at Sill for a while, and as a result had to do testing of units doing their annual readiness tests. It was appalling how bad some of the FOs were, but the battalion survey teams were worse. Your story about the aiming circle being in left field doesn't surprise me at all.

Some of it is still that bad.
We had young guys coming in that could do charts and darts faster than the current computer.
And that was fast.
I'm not sure exactly how they operated in there, seems that FDC is now an MOS of it's own. (13E)
I'm told that this isn't what used to be.

I'm still trying to fgure out how the heck the aiming circles ended up way out there like that. And I was there for that one. I still have ahard time believeing that we were 1200 mils out. In the morning light, we had dug a crescent in the dirt with the spade on the howitzers.
Would have been amusing if but for the fact that we were all so beat from the 24 hour ops.

I'm still wondering how the devil the OC's couldn't pick up that the problem wasn't our end with the bad firing data, unless they did know and were trying to figure out which 'clown' it was.
We were getting real annoyed on teh gunline with that one.
We'd fire one round, and go into checkfire for a few minutes.
Then they'd have us fire again, and again go into checkfire.
The whole time we had to walk away and have the OC's check all the numbers.

I remember an OC asking me a question about the record of fire sheets.
I made a habit of writing the safety T (Both high and low angle) down on the record of fire.
And more than a few times I caught out of safe data that way.
The OC asked if we had any trouble or confusion from it.
Usually, Chief would ask if we were good, and he'd either get a thumbs up from the gunner and myself, or both of us would be saying "Doesn't add up" about it.
I don't know if anyone else picked up on that or not.