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Re: Unistar Principle etc.
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2012 Apr 21, 10:37 -0400
From: Alexandre Eremenko
Date: 2012 Apr 21, 10:37 -0400
Kermit, It is not one article but several articles and books. I only list papers which come from developers or people who apparently have first-hand knowledge about actual systems. (There are also some pure speculative articles on "how is it possible to do this", from people who do not know how this is actually done). The one on which most people refer, and apparently the first statement of the Unistar Principle is S. F. Rounds, G. Marmar, Stellar-inertial guidance capabilities for advanced ICBM, in Collection of technical papers, AIAA Guidance and Control Conference, Gatlinburg Aug 15-17, 1983, pages 849-855. This was somewhat hard to obtain. Earlier American papers on the subject are B. Lichtenstein, testing of Stellar-Inertial Guidance Systems, IEEE transactions on military electronics, 1963, G. Kleinhesselink, Stellat Augumented Inertial Guidance for Ballistic Missiles, IEEE transactions, 1963. R. Gates, and M. Hall, SLBM fire control computationsal algorithms in support of stellar inertial guidance, Naval surface suport center, Dahlgren, VA 22448. P. Class, MMRBM guidance techniques described, Aviation Week and Space technology, Nov 19, 1962, 83-91. All these early article do not refer to Unistar, and discuss several star sightings. The book Owen Wilkes, Loran-C and Omega, describes them from the point of view of Polaris guidance, but the author is a political scientist, and is mainly interested in political scandals around Loran. But he discuss some tecnical matters as well, including Transit. The book of D. MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy: a historical sociology of nuclear missile guidance, Cambridge, MIT, 1990, recommended by Frank, is very interesting indeed and contains a lot of historical facts. It is very carefully researched, and most of the original papers that I found was with the help of this book. But the author is a sociologist, and the book shows he does not understand well technical matters himself. When it comes to this, he always cites the sources literally. Mackenzie claims that all US missiles after middle 1980-s use Unistar Principle, and that Russians apparently use 2 stars. Modern Chinese papers can be easily found on Google, but as I said they are not worth reading. Alex.