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Rangekeepers were electromechanical fire control computers used primarily during the early part of the 20th century. They were sophisticated analog computers whose development reached its zenith following World War II, specifically the Computer Mk 47 in the Mk 68 Gun Fire Control system. During World War II, rangekeepers directed gunfire on land, sea, and in the air. While rangekeepers were widely deployed, the most sophisticated rangekeepers were mounted on warships to direct the fire of long-range guns.
Contents
- Function
- Manual fire control
- Predecessor fire control tools and systems
- Power drives and Remote Power Control RPC
- Service in World War II
- Construction
- The problem of rangekeeping
- General technique
- Implementations of mathematical functions
- Servo speed stabilization
- Assembly
- Related targeting systems
- References
These warship-based computing devices needed to be sophisticated because the problem of calculating gun angles in a naval engagement is very complex. In a naval engagement, both the ship firing the gun and the target are moving with respect to each other. In addition, the ship firing its gun is not a stable platform because it will roll, pitch, and yaw due to wave action, ship change of direction, and board firing. The rangekeeper also performed the required ballistics calculations associated with firing a gun. This article focuses on US Navy shipboard rangekeepers, but the basic principles of operation are applicable to all rangekeepers regardless of where they were deployed.
Function
A rangekeeper is defined as an analog fire control system that performed three functions:
Manual fire control
The early history of naval fire control was dominated by the engagement of targets within visual range (also referred to as direct fire). In fact, most naval engagements before 1800 were conducted at ranges of 20 to 50 yards (20 to 50 m). Even during the American Civil War, the famous engagement between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia was often conducted at less than 100 yards (90 m) range. With time, naval guns became larger and had greater range. At first, the guns were aimed using the technique of artillery spotting. Artillery spotting involved firing a gun at the target, observing the projectile's point of impact (fall of shot), and correcting the aim based on where the shell was observed to land, which became more and more difficult as the range of the gun increased.
Predecessor fire control tools and systems
Between the American Civil War and 1905, numerous small improvements were made in fire control, such as telescopic sights and optical rangefinders. There were also procedural improvements, like the use of plotting boards to manually predict the position of a ship during an engagement. Around 1905, mechanical fire control aids began to become available, such as the Dreyer Table, Dumaresq (which was also part of the Dreyer Table), and Argo Clock, but these devices took a number of years to become widely deployed. These devices were early forms of rangekeepers.
The issue of directing long-range gunfire came into sharp focus during World War I with the Battle of Jutland. While the British were thought by some to have the finest fire control system in the world at that time, during the Battle of Jutland only 3% of their shots actually struck their targets. At that time, the British primarily used a manual fire control system. The one British ship in the battle that had a mechanical fire control system turned in the best shooting results. This experience contributed to rangekeepers becoming standard issue.
Power drives and Remote Power Control (RPC)
The US Navy's first deployment of a rangekeeper was on the USS Texas in 1916. Because of the limitations of the technology at that time, the initial rangekeepers were crude. During World War I, the rangekeepers could generate the necessary angles automatically, but sailors had to manually follow the directions of the rangekeepers (a task called "pointer following" or "follow the pointer"). Pointer following could be accurate, but the crews tended to make inadvertent errors when they became fatigued during extended battles. During World War II, servomechanisms (called "power drives" in the U.S. Navy and RPC in the Royal Navy) were developed that allowed the guns to automatically steer to the rangekeeper's commands with no manual intervention. The Mk. 1 and Mk. 1A computers contained approximately 20 servomechanisms, mostly position servos, to minimize torque load on the computing mechanisms. The Royal Navy first installed RPC, experimentally, aboard HMS Champion in 1928. In the 1930s RPC was used for naval searchlight control and during WW2 it was progressively installed on pom-pom mounts and directors, 4-inch, 4.5-inch and 5.25-inch gun mounts.
During their long service life, rangekeepers were updated often as technology advanced, and by World War II they were a critical part of an integrated fire control system. The incorporation of radar into the fire control system early in World War II provided ships with the ability to conduct effective gunfire operations at long range in poor weather and at night.
Service in World War II
During World War II, rangekeeper capabilities were expanded to the extent that the name "rangekeeper" was deemed to be inadequate. The term "computer," which had been reserved for human calculators, came to be applied to the rangekeeper equipment. After World War II, digital computers began to replace rangekeepers. However, components of the analog rangekeeper system continued in service with the US Navy until the 1990s.
The performance of these analog computers was impressive. The battleship USS North Carolina during a 1945 test was able to maintain an accurate firing solution on a target during a series of high-speed turns. It is a major advantage for a warship to be able to maneuver while engaging a target.
Night naval engagements at long range became feasible when radar data could be input to the rangekeeper. The effectiveness of this combination was demonstrated in November 1942 at the Third Battle of Savo Island when the USS Washington engaged the Japanese battlecruiser Kirishima at a range of 8,400 yards (7.7 km) at night. The Kirishima was set aflame, suffered a number of explosions, and was scuttled by her crew. She had been hit by nine 16-inch (410 mm) rounds out of 75 fired (12% hit rate). The wreck of the Kirishima was discovered in 1992 and showed that the entire bow section of the ship was missing. The Japanese during World War II did not develop radar or automated fire control to the level of the US Navy and were at a significant disadvantage. The Royal Navy began to introduce gyroscopic stabilization of their director gunsights in World War One and by the start of World War Two all warships fitted with director control had gyroscopically controlled gunsights.
The last combat action for the analog rangekeepers, at least for the US Navy, was in the 1991 Persian Gulf War when the rangekeepers on the Iowa-class battleships directed their last rounds in combat.
Construction
Rangekeepers were very large, and the ship designs needed to make provisions to accommodate them. For example, the Ford Mk 1A Computer weighed 3,150 pounds (1,430 kg) The Mk. 1/1A's mechanism support plates, some an inch (25 mm) thick, were made of aluminum alloy, but nevertheless, the computer is very heavy. On at least one refloated museum ship, the destroyer USS Cassin Young (now in Boston), the computer and Stable Element more than likely still are below decks, because they are so difficult to remove.
The rangekeepers required a large number of electrical signal cables for synchro data transmission links over which they received information from the various sensors (e.g. gun director, pitometer, rangefinder, gyrocompass) and sent commands to the guns.
These computers also had to be formidably rugged, partly to withstand the shocks created by firing the ship's own guns, and also to withstand the effects of hostile enemy hits to other parts of the ship. They not only needed to continue functioning, but also stay accurate.
The Ford Mark 1/1A mechanism was mounted into a pair of approximately cubical large castings with very wide openings, the latter covered by gasketed castings. Individual mechanisms were mounted onto thick aluminum-alloy plates, and along with interconnecting shafts, were progressively installed into the housing. Progressive assembly meant that future access to much of the computer required progressive disassembly.
The Mk 47 computer was a radical improvement in accessibility over the Mk 1/1A. It was more akin to a tall, wide storage cabinet in shape, with most or all dials on the front vertical surface. Its mechanism was built in six sections, each mounted on very heavy-duty pull-out slides. Behind the panel were typically a horizontal and a vertical mounting plate, arranged in a tee.
The problem of rangekeeping
Long-range gunnery is a complex combination of art, science, and mathematics. There are numerous factors that affect the ultimate placement of a projectile and many of these factors are difficult to model accurately. As such, the accuracy of battleship guns was ~1% of range (sometimes better, sometimes worse). Shell-to-shell repeatability was ~0.4% of range.
Accurate long-range gunnery requires that a number of factors be taken into account:
The calculations to predict and compensate for all these factors are complicated, frequent and error-prone when done by hand. Part of the complexity came from the amount of information that must be integrated from many different sources. For example, information from the following sensors, calculators, and visual aids must be integrated to generate a solution:
To increase speed and reduce errors, the military felt a dire need to automate these calculations. To illustrate the complexity, Table 1 lists the types of input for the Ford Mk 1 Rangekeeper (ca 1931).
However, even with all this data, the rangekeeper's position predictions were not infallible. The rangekeeper's prediction characteristics could be used to against it. For example, many captains under long-range gun attack would make violent maneuvers to "chase salvos" or "steer for the fall of shot," i.e., maneuver to the position of the last salvo splashes. Because the rangekeepers are constantly predicting new positions for the target, it was unlikely that subsequent salvos would strike the position of the previous salvo. Practical rangekeepers had to assume that targets were moving in a straight-line path at a constant speed, to keep complexity within acceptable limits. A sonar rangekeeper was built to track a target circling at a constant radius of turn, but that function was disabled.
General technique
The data were transmitted by rotating shafts. These were mounted in ball-bearing brackets fastened to the support plates. Most corners were at right angles, facilitated by miter gears in 1:1 ratio. The Mk. 47, which was modularized into six sections on heavy-duty slides, connected the sections together with shafts in the back of the cabinet. Shrewd design meant that the data carried by these shafts required no manual zeroing or alignment; only their movement mattered. The aided-tracking output from an integrator roller is one such example. When the section was slid back into normal position, the shaft couplings mated as soon as the shafts rotated.
Common mechanisms in the Mk. 1/1A included many miter-gear differentials, a group of four 3-D cams, some disk-ball-roller integrators, and servo motors with their associated mechanism; all of these had bulky shapes. However, most of the computing mechanisms were thin stacks of wide plates of various shapes and functions. A given mechanism might be an inch (25 mm) thick, possibly less, and more than a few were maybe 14 inches (36 cm) across. Space was at a premium, but for precision calculations, more width permitted a greater total range of movement to compensate for slight inaccuracies, stemming from looseness in sliding parts.
The Mk. 47 was a hybrid, doing some computing electrically, and the rest mechanically. It had gears and shafts, differentials, and totally enclosed disk-ball-roller integrators. However, it had no mechanical multipliers or resolvers ("component solvers"); these functions were performed electronically, with multiplication carried out using precision potentiometers.
In the Mk. 1/1A, however, excepting the electrical drive servos, all computing was mechanical.
Implementations of mathematical functions
The implementation methods used in analog computers were many and varied. The fire control equations implemented during World War II on analog rangekeepers are the same equations implemented later on digital computers. The key difference is that the rangekeepers solved the equations mechanically. While mathematical functions are not often implemented mechanically today, mechanical methods exist to implement all the common mathematical operations. Some examples include:
The four cams in the Mk. 1/1A computer provided mechanical time fuse setting, time of flight (this time is from firing to bursting at or near the target), time of flight divided by predicted range, and superelevation combined with vertical parallax correction. (Superelevation is essentially the amount the gun barrel needs to be raised to compensate for gravity drop.)
Servo speed stabilization
The Mk.1 and Mk.1A computers were electromechanical, and many of their mechanical calculations required drive movements of precise speeds. They used reversible two-phase capacitor-run induction motors with tungsten contacts. These were stabilized primarily by rotary magnetic drag (eddy-current) slip clutches, similar to classical rotating-magnet speedometers, but with a much higher torque. One part of the drag was geared to the motor, and the other was constrained by a fairly stiff spring. This spring offset the null position of the contacts by an amount proportional to motor speed, thus providing velocity feedback. Flywheels mounted on the motor shafts, but coupled by magnetic drags, prevented contact chatter when the motor was at rest. Unfortunately, the flywheels must also have slowed down the servos somewhat. A more elaborate scheme, which placed a rather large flywheel and differential between the motor and the magnetic drag, eliminated velocity error for critical data, such as gun orders.
The Mk. 1 and Mk. 1A computer integrator discs required a particularly elaborate system to provide constant and precise drive speeds. They used a motor with its speed regulated by a clock escapement, cam-operated contacts, and a jeweled-bearing spur-gear differential. Although the speed oscillated slightly, the total inertia made it effectively a constant-speed motor. At each tick, contacts switched on motor power, then the motor opened the contacts again. It was in effect slow pulse-width modulation of motor power according to load. When running, the computer had a unique sound as motor power was switched on and off at each tick—dozens of gear meshes inside the cast-metal computer housing spread out the ticking into a "chunk-chunk" sound.
Assembly
A detailed description of how to dismantle and reassemble the system was contained in the two-volume Navy Ordnance Pamphlet OP 1140 with several hundred pages and several hundred photographs. When reassembling, shaft connections between mechanisms had to be loosened and the mechanisms mechanically moved so that an output of one mechanism was at the same numerical setting (such as zero) as the input to the other. Fortunately these computers were especially well-made, and very reliable.
Related targeting systems
During WWII, all the major warring powers developed rangekeepers to different levels. Rangekeepers were only one member of a class of electromechanical computers used for fire control during World War II. Related analog computing hardware used by the United States included: