Method Of Numerical Integration In Exterior Ballistics Ordnance Textbook October 1919 PDF Download

Excerpt from A Course in Exterior Ballistics: Ordnance Textbook; December 1920 The work of the ballistic computer is divided into three parts (1) the computation of the elements of standard trajectories; (2) the computation of differential corrections, whereby the elements of a standard trajectory may be corrected for nonstandard conditions; and (3) the utilization of the foregoing to construct range tables from firing records. As is shown in Chapter VI, the World War ushered in a new era in the handling of ballistic problems. This may be called the period of numerical integration. The approximations, which had been used to modify the simple Newtonian equations of motion into such form that they could be formally integrated, gave place to precise numerical integration of these equations in their original form. Practically parallel progress was made in all of the allied countries during the war. In America the great step in the computation of trajectories was the introduction of numerical integration Numerical integration had long been used in astronomical calculations, and so it was natural that an astronomer and mathematician, Prof. F. R Moulton, of the University of Chicago, while serving as a major in the Ordnance Depart ment of the United States Army, should have applied this method to ballistics. The practical work of this method was materially reduced by formulas for integrating ahead later introduced. The work can be still further reduced by a variant of Maj. Moulton's method, known as the tangent-reciprocal method. But this method has the pedagogical drawback of obscuring the physical meaning of the steps involved, and hence will not be given first place in this book.' About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.