RE: Name that doodad, greeble, keg of beer, or whatever.

On Wed, 12 May 1999, Rick Rutherford wrote:

> Ndege Diamond wrote:
> 
> > The thing is that they both have a thing on the front that looks
like a
> > 55 gallon oil drum.  ... The big question is what could they
possibly be?
> 
> Why, it's obviously part of the grav-field generator! 

nonsense! my good man, you are clearly thinking of the late-series BAT
F5
armoured reconaissance vehicles, which did indeed use a laterally
mounted
preventral field coil housing. this was because the F5s, being rather
light, were unable to provide enough damping to allow the coil to
operate
smoothly in the 44 GHz range. thus, a heteromodal external field unit
was
added to allow this band to be employed.

the device which LFC diamond is puzzled over is the Type 1415
Intermediate
Altitude Holographic Maser Imaging Array (IAHMI), deployed on both the
FWA06 SPG and the FWT42 SPAA. the Type 1415 is a compact, robust sensor
system developed by Philips for sale to mass-market arms integrators and
subsequently adopted as a cheap improvement to a range of armoured
vehicles built by BAT.

the Type IAHMI is a high-resolution short-range radar, capable of
producing virtual holographic images suitable for analysis by any normal
vector signal processor, such as you might find in an armoured vehicle,
missile or one of the cheaper types of microwave oven. the device is
cylindrical to accomodate the multiple concentric masing tubes, which
employ a Holt relay, where each tube feeds the tube inside it, to
produce
very short pulses of coherent microwave radiation. a constant beam of
maser energy is produced either end, and it is here that active-field
emitters are used to split the beams, one being directed into the target
area, and the other retained for use as a reference beam in constructing
the hologram.

in the case of the FWA06, the Type 1415 is used primarly to track
outgoing
rounds in the vicinity of the element, so that the fire-control system
can
judge the wear on the gun barrel and the alignment of the firing
receptacle (the FWA06 uses the notoriously wobbly PF-4H howitzer
mechanism, and is only rescued from mediocrity by the excellent Intel
TapStar smart rounds). with the aid of this information, the FCS is able
to compensate for material defects in the gun and so achieve better
performance.

the FWT42 uses the Type 1415 in its more obvious role, as an instrument
for directing anti-missile fire. the capability to track all visible
objects in the target area, subject only to processing limitations,
makes
it the ideal choice for this task, as not only can a potentially large
number of inbound warheads be tracked, but it is possible to identify
and
discriminate between the various penetration aids (decoys, chaff, etc)
which modern missiles deploy in flight. furthermore, IAHMI devices are
able to track the stream of rounds fired by the vehicle's own cannons:
the
FWT42 uses this information to make rapid and tiny corrections to the
orientation of the Moulinex K440 autocannon system it carries, thus
optimising the stream's trajectory and improving interception time by as
much as 5%.

so there.

Tom