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Trevor,

Thank you for your interesting explanation
of the coast bombardment techniques.
On my opinion, these are interesting non-electronic
navigation techniques, so this is well within the scope
of our list:-)

(I am an artillerist by training, but of a different
kind, of anti-aircraft artillery:-)

I think Cel Nav has little to do with aiming guns.
(Even in the most refined CelNav experiments, they
achieved only 1/4 of a mile precision, which is
not enough to hit a ship, unless you use nuclear munition).
So I always thought that in the open sea gun battles they
could aim their guns only visually, I mean in WWI and WWII.
That is why the battleships had these enormous tall
towers with hudge range-finders on the top.

In a recent book on the history of Soviet Navy
(early Cold War preriod),
the following system of aiming ship-to-ship winged missiles
was described. The missiles had range of few hundred miles.
Several airplanes in the air between the ships formed
a sort of "triangulation net", permanently determining their
position with respect to each other, and one of them
with respect to the enemy ship. These airplanes guided the
missile by radio.

Alex.

On Sun, 21 Nov 2004, Trevor J. Kenchington wrote:

> Ian Buxton's excellent technical history of the monitors ("Big Gun
> Monitors", World Ship Society 1978)
> contains some information on the

   

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