Fascinating. I've often wondered about the old mechanical fire control computers. According to a TV show I saw, the fire control computers on US WWII submarines were so top secret no good documentation on them has survived, and I believe the only (or one of the few) fully intact examples left is on the USS Pampanito in San Francisco. Once the bugs were finally worked out in the Mark 14 torpedo US submarines were a hugely effective a weapon in the Pacific war.
The third body is the torpedo. Since it travels so much slower than a ballistic artillery projectile the navigation of the torpedo becomes the most important part of the problem to solve. A torpedo attack wan't the way it is portrayed in movies. It took hours to maneuver the submarine and plan the attack. This wasn't point and click. The course, speed, and other characteristics were programmed into the torpedo before it was launched.
Looks like it ended up making it to the front page of reddit; you may have to give it a few hours (unfortunately it may end up dying here before people get a chance to see it).
As always my computer science forefathers were more manly than I am. It really is fascinating how these clever mechanisms can be used to solve a dynamic problem such as fire control.
My first encounter with a CS "forefather" was my CS101 professor. He had a long gray beard , glasses, a pocket protector and could do mental arithmetic in octal. When he started in CS there was no CS, so he was a logician, and then switched to CS. The oldest professor from the philosophy department still refers to him as a "traitor"
The best I can piece together the impetus for these computers followed the Battle of Manila Bay, where Commodore Dewey's gun crews fired off a whole lot of ordinance for very few hits. At the time each gun crew sighted their own gun.
By the Battle of Tsushima in the Russian-Japanese War the Japanese, if not the Russians too, must have had this kind of fire control on their British built ships.
