Questions on the Effectiveness of U.S. Navy Battleship Gunnery: Notes on the Origins of U.S. Navy Gun Fire Control System Range Keepers

摘要

Warship International, no. 4 (2001), reprinted an V V extract from the covering letter on a 1922 Naval Academy confidential handbook (see pp. 402-403) on gun fire control. The potentially significant questions concerning U.S. Navy battleship effectiveness raised in the document were as follows: 1. What was the nature of the U.S. Navy's comparative trials of the Ford and Pollen gunnery fire control calculating instruments aboard battleship Louisiana? 2. Did the Ford machine share some or all basic principles with the Pollen machine? 3. Given the facts established above, was the Ford machine superior to the Pollen machine? 4. What was the substance of the June 1917 conference on fire control systems, comparing the Ford and Pollen systems? 5. Who was the "British gunnery officer" who came to the U.S.A. in April 1917, "to tell us everything" about gun fire control? What information was provided?