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I wonder if the Americans' books of tables were generated by automated computers.

You'd think the Germans would find their own way to such a dominant approach -- especially as it was so suited to mobile warfare, which they were reinventing early in the war. An absence of the technical resources to generate the tables would be one explanation for why they didn't.




I did a little digging, as I'm a huge WWII nerd after reading this article, and it does seem like the Eniac was used to generate artillery tables, but it's not clear if those were the same as used by the centralized firing control.


Answer, from a link on another comment, seems to be no.

http://99div.com/olddirect/american_and_german_field_artille...

The chief factor seems to have been an American reorganization of artillery in the 20s and 30s, chiefly intended to support centralization of battery fire at a battalion level.


Note how Tesla chiefly intends to avoid central battery fire today.


We had other computers than Eniac that could compute fire control solutions for artillery. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_I_Fire_Control_Computer




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