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A Physicist with the Air Force
An anonymous submitter - anonymous because of the database crash that wiped out several hours of data today, sigh - sent in this tale about the duties of a physicist during World War II.
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At the pilot's insistence (I will not repeat his heated words), I dislodged the target by jumping on it while hanging from a bomb-bay rack and wearing a parachute, just in case.
For those who didn't read the article (after all, if you did, this comment is worthless to you), he's talking about a training "dummy aircraft" for gunners to practice shooting at that didn't drop from the bomber that was carrying, and jammed in the bomb bay, preventing the doors from closing (which meant they couldn't land). Quite a hilarious mental picture if you ask me ;)
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
At first I thought he was kidding about the slide rule club - I guess we're this generation's equivalent.
It's a little sobering to think of these engineering problems in their human context - even ignoring the fact that he's talking about bombers, it's striking to think that they had enough data to calculate 70-to-1 fighter-to-B29 kill ratios on rear attacks and 3-to-1 kill ratios on front attacks.
The opportunity to make adjustments to decisions as theoretical data are replaced by empirical data is exciting and rewarding. But I'm glad my adjustments don't have an immediate impact with respect to people living and dying.
This is an article which really makes me appriciate what we have today. If someone today told me I had to perform computations on a slide-rule while fending from enemy attack, I would think they're joking. But this is what they actually went through.
My favorite line of the entire article (in reference to the fabrication of slide rules used in the missions):
But, to avoid paperwork and delivery delays, I chose to have them made at the Harmon Field sheet-metal shop on Guam. At that time, there wasn't much combat damage to B-29s. So the repair crews readily gave up some of their beach time for a few bottles of Old Granddad.
Yep, things we're certainly different back then!
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
And I especially note this one:
:)
``Requests for special slide rules grew. To respond quickly, I set up a paperwork-free design and production service. Our streamlined procedures took advantage of the fact that officers had a monthly liquor allowance but enlisted men did not. To secure a special slide rule, the requesting officer would pay with two bottles. I would pass these contributions along to the enlisted members of the 949th Topographical Company, who did the drafting, calculations, and reproductions. Somehow our service enjoyed a de facto priority second only to the production of mission maps.''
My God...it's the grandfather of "Free as in Beer!"
After six weeks of data collection and statistical analysis, I completed my report. My analysis showed that, in attacks on our B-29s from the rear, it cost the enemy 70 lost fighter planes, on average, to shoot down one of our bombers. But in frontal attacks, the Japanese lost only three fighters for every B-29 they downed. This result differed starkly from the results of a massive combat simulation study, done back home, that had concluded that B-29s would be most vulnerable to attacks from behind! In light of the new findings, bomber formations and tactics were modified to bring greater firepower to bear against frontal attacks. These changes, together with some minor technical modifications, largely solved the problem
Any guesses what they were doing wrong with the "massive combat simulation study"?
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
sign change error? ;-)
(how many times, if you were a technical student, have you ever calculated a negative mass or something and realized it was a simple sign error somewhere in the middle of a pages-long computation?)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
From the pilot's own account of the Nagasaki bombing:
If that's what a bomb at 1640 feet feels like from 30000 feet and after turning away and hauling ass out of there as fast as possible, then there's... well... to be blunt, I see no effing way a B-29 could deliver a high-altitude demonstration burst and have survived, slide rule or not.
(By way of reference, the service ceiling of a B-29 is around 33000 feet. Flying to 60000 feet simply wasn't an option with the technology at the time - and the B-29 was the only aircraft capable of lifting something as heavy as a nuke and flying it the required distance.)
War isn't pretty. War isn't supposed to be pretty. The day war becomes pretty, we've all got problems.