Wavelength
Airman 1st Class
- 108
- Jan 31, 2010
That is why we need to weigh all the available evidence and correlate action reports with well researched secondary accounts. As well as just use some common sense. The action reports do give us a lot of insight into such things and details such as Washington shooting on generated data instead of real time data at times and so forth. It is only by this that it becomes obvious that Washington had to be shooting at phantom. But this could not be known to the Americans until it was checked against Japanese records after the war. Even then it seems to slip by most secondary accounts.
The caution about treating action reports and other documents as written in stone also applies to the British reports about N. Cape. That's probably one reason that the actual events of N Cape as you say tend to be a bit ambiguous from account to account.
I don't think firing solution is the right term. Firing solution implies that the location of the momentary gunflashes can be ranged with a degree of precision. It going to be pretty mercurial. The biggest problem of the American gun flashes wasn't in giving away their location to the enemy but by blinding their own crews. The American warships were not originally designed to fight night it would seem. The optics proved useless at night.
German ships had completely seperate optical equipment for fighting at day and fighting at night or during poor visibility. This is why the British speculation that Scharnhorst was accurately ranging on gunflashes beyond 17,000 yards is so implausable. The day optics couldn't do it and the night optics were designed to operate within about 10,000 meters range. The night optics expected to be able to range on a target illuminated by starshell or search light, not a flash lasting a split second.
The British speculate that SH might have been ranging on gunflashes because the accuracy seemed to drop off a bit when the secondary battery of Duke of York stopped firing. But in the same paragraph they also state that these temporary drop offs in accuracy coincided to when the jammer had zeroed in on the German radar frequency thereby supporting that sH was indeed using radar. Seetakt was frequency agile so once a jammer zeroed in on the frequency they could change frequency in a constant cat and mouse game.
The caution about treating action reports and other documents as written in stone also applies to the British reports about N. Cape. That's probably one reason that the actual events of N Cape as you say tend to be a bit ambiguous from account to account.
I don't think firing solution is the right term. Firing solution implies that the location of the momentary gunflashes can be ranged with a degree of precision. It going to be pretty mercurial. The biggest problem of the American gun flashes wasn't in giving away their location to the enemy but by blinding their own crews. The American warships were not originally designed to fight night it would seem. The optics proved useless at night.
German ships had completely seperate optical equipment for fighting at day and fighting at night or during poor visibility. This is why the British speculation that Scharnhorst was accurately ranging on gunflashes beyond 17,000 yards is so implausable. The day optics couldn't do it and the night optics were designed to operate within about 10,000 meters range. The night optics expected to be able to range on a target illuminated by starshell or search light, not a flash lasting a split second.
The British speculate that SH might have been ranging on gunflashes because the accuracy seemed to drop off a bit when the secondary battery of Duke of York stopped firing. But in the same paragraph they also state that these temporary drop offs in accuracy coincided to when the jammer had zeroed in on the German radar frequency thereby supporting that sH was indeed using radar. Seetakt was frequency agile so once a jammer zeroed in on the frequency they could change frequency in a constant cat and mouse game.
