wrote:

On Thu, 06 Oct 2005 00:56:43 -0400, Peter Stickney
wrote:

snipped for brevity here and there

Of course if the ships are inadequately protected or you can
overwhelm the defenses then you might be able to reprise the fate of
HMS PRINCE
OF WALES and REPULSE.

Most of the damage to Repulse and Prince of Wales was by torpedoes,
IIRC.

You might be right.

He is. All the significant damage was due to torps. IIRR Repulse suffered
either one or two hits by 250kg.bombs, but the damage was relatively minor.
It was the five torp hits that sank her, and the 7 or so (and no bomb hits
IIRC) that did for PoW.

snip

The Norden worked by tracking the target - the Bombardier put the

crosshairs on the target, and started tracking it manually (Twist
knobs to keep the crosshairs on target) When the sight was properly
tracking, it would keep the crosshairs on target by itself. When the
appropriate release point was reached, as determined by the
airplane's altitude, speed, attitude, (You could be climbing or
gliding with a Norden, within certain limits) the ambient conditions,
and the bomb's ballistic characteristics as dialed into the sight, it
would automatically release the bombs.
There was a minimum altitude, which was driven by how fast the sights
tracking motors could drive the crosshairs.
So - since you weren't squinting at a spot on the ground, but
tracking the target relative to the bomber, it would compute for a
moving target. The Norden was developed by the Navy, y'know. I
think they had ships in mind. Every Torpedo Bomber could carry one,
for use in their level bombing role (Which they rarely did), and
every Patrol Bomber carried one.
The drawbacks are that if the ship jinks, it screws up the tracking
solution, and you've got to re-synchronize and let the sight settle.

Thanks for info on the Norden. I was not aware of its roots.

For a history of the Norden as well as most other pre-war US (and allied)
bombsights, see "America's Pursuit of Precision Bombing, 1910-1945", by
Stephen L. McFarland. The book includes details of how it worked, the
political fight between the navy and the Army over control of production
and access to it, development and production issues, German pre-war
espionage that rendered moot most of the elaborate wartime security
measures (they had a similar tachymetric bombsight of their own), accuracy
achieved in test and combat, statistical studies of the factors that
degraded accuracy, and so on.

snip

Guy