The New California Republic wrote:Not really. I've been treating it as part and parcel of the same problem the entire time.
No it isn't.
The New California Republic wrote:The coincidence and radar rangefinders/directionfinders typically on board the ships were large and heavy, typically several metres across. To my knowledge no equipment existed in WW2 that would have allowed a scout plane to determine range and bearing with the accuracy required for the ship to successfully engage the enemy.
1. Planes can provide accurate observation for naval gunnery even at ranges beyond the ships line of sight.
2. Planes do not require extremely accurate measurements of their position or the targets position to do this.
3. The longer the time of flight of a shell the more manoeuvering will negatively impact hit probability.
All these things are true. You are jumping back and forth between a true claim (3) and a completely unrelated claim about aircraft being unable to provide sufficiently accurate observations to correct fire. That two battleships duelling 40 km apart, both manoeuvering hard, are very unlikely to score hits on each other is true. But it would still be true if they were both able to track each other on radar in real-time with excellent accuracy. The biggest error source, in this case, is the difference between the projected future position the guns are laid to hit and the actual future position the target is occupying when the shells arrive. The derivative of the acceleration capability of the target on the Z and X axises - which is a value that cannot be measured directly by any gunnery instrument - is what is causing the errors in the future position to grow exponentially with time.
Perfect observation of range, azimuth, velocity etc will only reduce the error linearly and conversely errors in these measurements only increase the error in a linear way.... but increasing time of flight increases it exponentially, so the effect of range (time of flight) washes out other uncertainties pretty quickly when a target is manoeuvering.