"Charles Gray" wrote in message
...
Numerous bombers and heavy fighters, especially thowse that entered
service post 1943 have reference to remote controlled weapons.

Now, the remote control part should be fairly easy, but how were
they aimed? I'm assuming that you linked the gunners controls in such
a way thatthe gun always fired at the point where he was aiming,
making allowences for the location of the gun-- but how effective were
they? How hard was it to keep them in repair, as that sounds like a
fairly complex and advanced system for the 1940's.

The B-29 had remote controlled turrets. Each gunner (and the bombadier,
IIRC) had a computerized gun sight that he used to track the target. He was
required to be able to identify the target by aircraft type, as the wingspan
of the target had to be entered into the system in order for it to be
accurate. The information from his sight track went to the central fire
control computer which crunched the numbers (electromechanically) and
adjusted the guns under his control accordingly. The central fire control
gunner was perched in the rear dorsal blister, and he could switch control
of various turrets to the various gunners, who normally had primary control
of one particular turret.

It faced it s fair share of teething troubles during development, but it was
judged to be very effective during WWII (and even later, as the Soviets
copied the system for their Tu-4 Bull and then carried the same basic system
over for use in the later Tu-16 and Tu-20/95). My father trained as a B-29
gunner and flew missions over Japan--he had also trained on the B-17 and
B-24 with their manually operated guns, and he definitely considered the
B-29's system to be superior to those. During Korea the original system was
found wanting versus higher speed jet attacks; that should not have been a
big surprise, as B-29 crews facing early generation jets during training
towards the close of WWII had already reported that tracking the faster
interceptors was a real challenge (my dad's crew had rotated back stateside
to attend lead crew school before returning to Guam, and he had the
opportunity to particpate in such a training experiment out of what was then
Muroc AAF (later Edwards AFB).

Brooks