Snap-Shoot Gunsight for Fixed-Gun Fighter Aircraft

摘要

The design philosophy, mechanization and employment of three types of air-to-air gunsights are discussed from the standpoint of their effectiveness in providing a fighter pilot with accurate and usable steering information during an aerial engagement. Two of the gunsights, the so-called 'iron sight' and the Lead-Computing Optical Sight (LCOS), are common to most modern fighter aircraft. The third system is a radically new concept in fire control computation called the 'snapshoot' gunsight. The snap-shoot concept is an attempt to arrive at a more realistic division of responsibility between man and machine than either the lead-computing optical sight or the iron sight. With the lead-computing optical sight, the pilot is relieved of all computational and most of the measurement responsibilities, requiring only that he 'track' a target with a dynamic visual cue (a pipper). The authors contend that the pilot is in a much better position than is the computer to determine future target motion. All existing computing gunsights, however, relieve the pilot of this responsibility. The snap-shoot gunsight concept relies heavily upon the pilot's natural predictive ability, while the computer is given the task of determining accurate projectile trajectories and displaying them to the pilot. (Author)