Long-range naval gunnery required calculations for a moving firing ship and a moving target, sometimes at distances where curvature and the horizon complicated observation. Battleship gunnery therefore encouraged mechanical computers and systematic machine-assisted calculation. In this account, mathematical machine thinking developed for gunnery later underpinned wartime codebreaking systems associated with Enigma and Bletchley Park. Fire control was one route by which navies demanded reliable computation before electronic computers.
Notable Point · 2:52-4:13
Mechanical computation for long-range naval gunnery
Why battleship fire-control problems encouraged mechanical computation and mathematical machine methods before electronic computers.