“Some serious number crunching in there.”
The computer does it, or it doesn’t get done. To include weather drones/balloons to measure wind along the way.
Not 40 years ago.
We had the FADAC, (field artillery digital automatic computer), which a good FDCer could beat in deriving firing data, and we often fired off of manually derived firing data.
Not entirely. The Korean War-era book of Firing Tables for the Iowa class Battleship 16" guns was calculated at the University of Illinois using the best electronic vacuum-tube Von Neumann IAS machine *calculator* then in existance, the facility thence known as ILLIAC I and having about the computing power of a current $3.00 pocket calculator. ILLIAC evolved, brought forth later generations, to ILLIAC 4, the first massively parallel computer. Daniel Slotnick was working as a programmer on the IAS machine in 1952 when the idea of building a computer using an array of processors came to him. Relocated to the NASA Ames Research Center in California, a few flaws corrected, 3 years later ILLIAC IV was connected to the ARPA Net for distributed use in November 1975, becoming the first network-available supercomputer.
You could say that the Internet became available because artillerymen needed better ballistic data, as did theit follow-on, NASA. Thank you Mr Slotnick, and thank you, [Admiral] Grace Hopper.