Verification and feasibility study of a micro-computer based ballistics algorithm.

Abstract

The radical cost reductions in computer hardware brought about by large scale integration (LSI) has motivated this feasibility study which explores the use of the INTEL 8080 as a ballistics computer in a distributed micro-computer based air-borne tactical weapons system. The results show that software floating point arithmetic using a sixteen bit mantissa is sufficiently accurate for solving the ballistics problem. Experimental data failed to show that mathematical model accurately predicts the weapon's behavior. Either the instrumentation to record the release data was inaccurate, or the ballistics tables do not accurately predict the actual behavior of falling weapons.