Hi Matt,
>...and not one mention of the various sighting systems.
Good point!
The Allied gyroscopic (lead-computing) gun sight (British Mk VIII, I believe, and American K-14) was quite good in that regard, and actually deployed in numbers, while the German EZ42 appeared to be even more advanced, but comparatively rare.
The Germans even seem to have had a radar-ranging computing gunsight under development, but I have only seen one mention of this in the Baade report, outlining the state of the art for the Soviets immediately after the war.
The Germans also experimented with magnifying telescopic gun sights (not quite the same as the WW1-vintage telescopic sights which were in use in some aircraft at the beginning of the war - Japanese fighters and US dive bombers, I believe). The German version differed by having a useful magnification, and by being combined with a reflector sight into one unit so that the disadvantages of the telescopic sight - badly limited field of view - wouldn't be a problem. However, it seems that with the optics of the day, there was really little to gain from telescopic sights, and I'm not aware of any combat use.
Going back to the beginning of the war, the British had introduced stadiametric sights with a sighting circle that would match the wingspan of a target if that was properly identified, its wingspan dialed into the sight, and the desired firing range also dialed into the sight and achieved by approaching to the correct range. Though this was supposed to be a military secret, it had leaked early on and failed to impress the Luftwaffe, who relied on training their pilots to use graduated crosshairs instead. As the RAF pilots usually set some compromise values and extrapolated from there, actual gunnery practice probably was similar for both technological approaches.
(The excellent success of the Polish fighter pilots in RAF gunnery competitions seems to suggest that pilot training was the critical factor even with the stadiametric sight.)
Regards,
Henning (HoHun)