Mils unit? (1 Viewer)

Ad: This forum contains affiliate links to products on Amazon and eBay. More information in Terms and rules

G

gomwolf

Guest
I cannot find any other forum can get answer.

1.png


This picture describing about accuracy of HVAR fired by F-84G. (You can get full document in this address. - DTIC AD0017568: OPERATIONAL SUITABILITY TEST OF THE F-86F AIRPLANE : Defense Technical Information Center : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive) It use mils unit for 'Radius 50% circular' and I don't know how to understand this 'mils'.

It seems to milliradian, but I am not quite sure. I am trying to calculate CEP, but this unit disturbing me.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Gomwolf,

From the pilot perspective the gunsight / weapons aiming glass has an adjustable mil reticle. When employing manual weapons (bombs / rockets / guns) you can adjust your "gunsight" in increments called mils. With bombs in particular you have to adjust for winds and that was done in one of two ways: mil crank or combat offset. Mil cranking involved estimating how much you have to adjust the sight (so the pipper would be on the target) for your bombs to hit the target. When going to the range, you would look for smoke stacks, large flags, bodies of water to help you guess what the winds were doing. If you were in combat or a competition the flight lead would tell everyone where he put his pipper on the first pass so they could make adjustments off of that. If you reached up and dial adjusted mils, you mil cranked. If you don't mil crank, you adjust by moving your pipper in relation to the target to compensate for winds, and that is called "combat offset".

Then there are a thing called tiger errors. If you are dropping you need to be on dive angle, speed, and at the proper altitude when you pickle. If you pickle a 100' high, or fast, or shallow, the error is greater than 100' low, or slow, or steep. So what you need to walk away with is being steep, fast, and pressing will result in "smaller" errors than it's equal opposite. Steep, fast and press was the mantra for better scores.

Cheers,
Biff
 
Thanks for answers. It seems to milliradian quite sure and its 50% CEP is 65.88m in my calculate.
 
I always have a hard time with this, but not calculating it.

My trouble is knowing if I am dealing with real milliradians, NATO mils, or Eastern Block mils. When you see a mil value, the unit is rarely defined, and sometimes the source is not very informative for even an educated guess.

If it is modern military in English, German, French, Spanish, Greek, or any NATO country (sometimes not know), I'd say NATO mils.

If it is obviously sourced from eastern block, I'd assume eastern block mils.

For WWII, I don't know becasue NATO wasn't around then ... so it might be 6400 to a circle or it might be 6283.185 to a circle, and I've never seen a WWII-era definition of it.

And I'm still wondering ... and the distance will NEVER be known unless the range for the mills is known. 60 mils at 1000 meters is NOT the same as 60 mils at 2000 meters!

So, you need to know which mils and the range, and THEN you can get it.
 
Last edited:
US military used 4000 mil until early 50s AFAIK. So I conversion it to 6400 mil and you can see the average slant range on that documents. It is 3690ft. At that condition, 50% CEP is 65.88m.
 
US military used 4000 mil until early 50s AFAIK. So I conversion it to 6400 mil and you can see the average slant range on that documents. It is 3690ft. At that condition, 50% CEP is 65.88m.

I thought the 4000 number was decigrades, not mils? Also, I think the US military switched from decigrades to mils in the 1920's or before, although NATO did not adopt it as a published standard until the 50's (most nations in NATO already used 6400 mils though). For sure I have seen US WW II hardware marked in mils that used 6400 in 360 deg.

And just to muddy the waters even more there was also the Swedish mils, or streck, at 6300 streck per 360 degrees.

T!
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Back