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The Guided Missile
Throughout the greatest part of its history, right up to the
period following World War II, two of the primary problems
with artillery were inability to engage targets at very short
range, and its relative lack of accuracy at longer ranges:
these two factors combined to reduce the overall military
utility of heavy artillery, and to make the destruction of
long-range targets expensive in terms of the number of rounds
of ammunition that had to be fired before the target had been
destroyed. For these reasons, therefore, a desire was often
expressed for the creation of a weapon that offered greater
accuracy than artillery for the probability of the destruction
of specific targets at long range.
The first
practical expression of this desire was the `locomotive'
torpedo brought to a practical level by Robert Whitehead in
1868. This may truly claim to be the precursor of the modern
guided missile, for it combined moderately long range and
considerable destructive power in a single weapon made
significantly more accurate than any of its predecessors by an
onboard guidance package comprising a gyroscopic platform for
course-keeping and any one of several depth-keeping systems
for control of the weapon's running depth under the water. By
the end of the nineteenth century, the torpedo had been
brought to a high state of capability for launch firstly by
surface ships and later by submarines, and then during the
course of World War I by the aeroplane.
In its basic
form, the torpedo had no terminal guidance system, for there
were no cybernetic systems on which any real form of terminal
guidance could have been based. Before it was fired, the
weapon therefore relied on the insertion of the parameters of
its own launch position and the expected interception point.
The same basic concept was used in the first aerial guided
missile to reach the hardware stage after design as a
surface-to-surface bombardment weapon. This was the
Delco/Sperry Bug designed in 1917 for the US Army as a small
aeroplane-type weapon that was capable of delivering a 3001b
(136kg) warload over a range of some 62 miles (100km) with a
fair degree of accuracy, as a result of its guidance by a
Sperry system using an altimeter for longitudinal control, a
primitive gyroscopic platform for lateral and directional
control, and an engine revolution counter for range control.
The `missile' was a small biplane made of wood-reinforced
papier mache with a card skin, and was powered by a 40hp
(29.8kW) Ford petrol engine. Plans were laid for the type's
mass production as a bombardment weapon for use on the Western
Front, but the Armistice of November 1918 ended hostilities
before the type could be placed in large-scale production.
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