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Norden bombsight

The '''Norden Mk. XV, known as the Norden M''' series in U.S. Army service, is a bombsight that was used by the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) and the United States Navy during World War II, and the United States Air Force in the Korean and the Vietnam Wars. It was an early tachometric design, which combined optics, a mechanical computer, and an autopilot for the first time to not merely identify a target but fly the airplane to it. The bombsight directly measured the aircraft's ground speed and direction, which older types could only estimate with lengthy manual procedures. The Norden further improved on older designs by using an analog computer that continuously recalculated the bomb's impact point based on changing flight conditions, and an autopilot that reacted quickly and accurately to changes in the wind or other effects.

Together, these features promised unprecedented accuracy for daytime bombing from high altitudes. During prewar testing the Norden demonstrated a 150 ft circular error probable (CEP), an astonishing performance for that period. This precision would enable direct attacks on ships, factories, and other point targets. Both the Navy and the USAAF saw it as a means to conduct successful high-altitude bombing. For example, an invasion fleet could be destroyed long before it could reach U.S. shores.

To protect these advantages, the Norden was granted the utmost secrecy well into the war, and was part of a production effort on a similar scale to the Manhattan Project: the overall cost (both R&D and production) was $1.1 billion, as much as 2/3 of the latter or over a quarter of the production cost of all B-17 bombers. The Norden was not as secret as believed; both the British SABS and German Lotfernrohr 7 worked on similar principles, and details of the Norden had been passed to Germany even before the war started.

Under combat conditions the Norden did not achieve its expected precision, yielding an average CEP in 1943 of 1200 ft, similar to other Allied and German results. Both the Navy and Air Forces had to give up using pinpoint attacks. The Navy turned to dive bombing and skip bombing to attack ships, while the Air Forces developed the lead bomber procedure to improve accuracy, and adopted area bombing techniques for ever-larger groups of aircraft. Nevertheless, the Norden's reputation as a pin-point device endured, due in no small part to Norden's own advertising of the device after secrecy was reduced late in the war.

The Norden saw reduced use in the post–World War II period after radar-based targeting was introduced, but the need for accurate daytime attacks kept it in service, especially during the Korean War. The last combat use of the Norden was in the U.S. Navy's VO-67 squadron, which used it to drop sensors onto the Ho Chi Minh Trail in 1967. The Norden remains one of the best-known bombsights.

Early work
The Norden sight was designed by Carl Norden, a Dutch engineer educated in Switzerland who immigrated to the U.S. in 1904. In 1911, Norden joined Sperry Gyroscope to work on ship gyrostabilizers, and then moved to work directly for the U.S. Navy as a consultant. At the Navy, Norden worked on a catapult system for a proposed flying bomb that was never fully developed, but this work introduced various Navy personnel to Norden's expertise with gyro stabilization.

World War I bomb sight designs had improved rapidly, with the ultimate development being the Course Setting Bomb Sight, or CSBS. This was essentially a large mechanical calculator that directly represented the wind triangle using three long pieces of metal in a triangular arrangement. The hypotenuse of the triangle was the line the aircraft needed to fly along in order to arrive over the target in the presence of wind, which, before the CSBS, was an intractable problem. Almost all air forces adopted some variation of the CSBS as their standard inter-war bomb sight, including the U.S. Navy, who used a modified version known as the Mark III.

It was already realized that one major source of error in bombing was levelling the aircraft enough so the bombsight pointed straight down, even small errors in levelling could produce dramatic errors in accuracy. The US Army did not adopt the CSBS and instead used a simpler design, the Estoppey D-series, as it automatically levelled the sight during use. Navy experiments showed these roughly doubled accuracy, so they began a series of developments to add a gyroscopic stabilizer to their bombsights. In addition to new designs like the Inglis (working with Sperry) and Seversky, Norden was asked to provide an external stabilizer for the Navy's existing Mark III designs.

Mark III-A
Although the CSBS and similar designs allowed the calculation of the proper flight angle needed to correct for windage, they did so by looking downward out of the aircraft. Very simple bombsights could be operated by the pilot, but as their sophistication grew they demanded full-time operators. This task was often given to the front or rear gunner. In Army aircraft they would sit near enough to the pilot to indicate any required directional adjustments using hand signals, or if they sat behind the pilot, using strings attached to the pilot's jacket.

The Navy's first bombers were large flying boats, where the pilot sat well away from the front of the fuselage, and one could not simply cut a hole for the bombsight to view through. Instead, the bombs were normally aimed by an observer in the nose of the aircraft. This made communications with the pilot very difficult. To address this, the Navy developed the concept of the pilot direction indicator, or PDI, an electrically-driven pointer that the observer used to indicate which direction to turn. The bombardier used switches to move the pointer on his unit to indicate the direction of the target, which was duplicated on the unit in front of the pilot so he could maneuver the aircraft to follow suit.

Norden's attempt to fit a stabilizer to the Mark III, the Mark III-A, also included a separate contract to develop a new automatic PDI. Norden proposed removing the electrical switches used to move the pointer and using the entire bombsight itself as the indicator. In place of the thin metal wires that formed the sights on the Mark III, a small low-power telescope would be used in its place. The bombardier would rotate the telescope left or right to follow the target. This motion would cause the gyros to precess, and this signal would drive the PDI automatically. The pilot would follow the PDI as before.

Norden initially delivered three prototypes of the stabilized bombsight without the automatic PDI. In testing, the Navy found that while the system did improve accuracy when it worked, it was complicated to use and often failed, leaving the real-world accuracy no better than before. They asked Norden for suggestions on ways to improve this. They were still interested in the PDI work, and the contract was allowed to continue.

Mark XI
Norden suggested that the only solution to improve accuracy would be to directly measure the ground speed, as opposed to calculating it using the CSBS's wind triangle. To time the drop, Norden used an idea already in use on other bombsights, the "equal distance" concept. This was based on the observation that the time needed to travel a certain distance over the ground would remain relatively constant during the bomb run, as the wind would not be expected to change dramatically over a short period of time. If you could accurately mark out a distance on the ground, or in practice, an angle in the sky, timing the passage over that distance would give you all the information needed to time the drop.

Norden's version of the system was very similar to the Army's Estoppey D-4 of the same era, differing largely in the physical details of the actual sights. The D-4 used thin wires as the sights, while Norden's would use the small telescope of the Mark III-A. To use the system, the bombardier looked up the expected time it would take for the bombs to fall from the current altitude. This time was set into a countdown stopwatch, and the sights were set to the angle that the bombs would fall if there was no wind. The bombardier waited for the target to line up with a crosshair in the telescope. When it did, the timer was started, and the bombardier rotated the telescope around its vertical axis to track the target as they flew toward it. This movement was linked to a second crosshair through a gearing system. The bombardier continued moving the telescope until the timer ran out. The second crosshair was now at the correct aiming angle, or range angle, after accounting for any difference between groundspeed and airspeed. The bombardier then waited for the target to pass through the second crosshair to time the drop.

In 1924, the first prototype of this design, known to the Navy as the Mark XI, was delivered to the Navy's proving grounds in Virginia. In testing, the system proved disappointing. The circular error probable (CEP), a circle into which 50% of the bombs would fall, was 110 ft wide from only 3000 ft altitude. This was an error of over 3.6%, somewhat worse than existing systems. Moreover, bombardiers universally complained that the device was far too hard to use. Norden worked tirelessly on the design, and by 1928, the accuracy had improved to 2% of altitude. This was enough for the Navy's Bureau of Ordnance to place a US$348,000 contract (equivalent to $ million in ) for 80 production examples.

Norden was known for his confrontational and volatile nature. He often worked 16-hour days and thought little of anyone who did not. Navy officers began to refer to him as "Old Man Dynamite". During development, the Navy asked Norden to consider taking on a partner to handle the business and leave Norden free to develop the engineering side. They recommended former Army colonel Theodore Barth, an engineer who had been in charge of gas mask production during World War I. The match-up was excellent, as Barth had the qualities Norden lacked: charm, diplomacy, and a head for business. The two became close friends.

Initial U.S. Army interest
In December 1927, the United States Department of War was granted permission to use a bridge over the Pee Dee River in North Carolina for target practice, as it would soon be sunk in the waters of a new dam. The 1st Provisional Bombardment Squadron, equipped with Keystone LB-5 bombers, attacked the bridge over a period of five days, flying 20 missions a day in perfect weather and attacking at altitudes from 6000 to(-). After this massive effort, the middle section of the bridge finally fell on the last day. However, the effort as a whole was clearly a failure in any practical sense.

About the same time as the operation was being carried out, General James Fechet replaced General Mason Patrick as commander of the USAAC. He received a report on the results of the test, and on 6 January 1928 sent out a lengthy memo to Brigadier General William Gillmore, chief of the Material Division at Wright Field, stating:

I cannot too strongly emphasize the importance of a bomb sight of precision, since the ability of bombardment aviation to perform its mission of destruction is almost entirely dependent upon an accurate and practical bomb sight.

He went on to request information on every bombsight then used at Wright, as well as "the Navy's newest design". However, the Mark XI was so secret that Gillmore was not aware Fechet was referring to the Norden. Gilmore produced contracts for twenty-five examples of an improved version of the Seversky C-1, the C-3, and six prototypes of a new design known as the Inglis L-1. The L-1 never matured, and Inglis later helped Seversky to design the improved C-4.

The wider Army establishment became aware of the Mark XI in 1929 and was eventually able to buy an example in 1931. Their testing mirrored the Navy's experience; they found that the gyro stabilization worked and the sight was accurate, but it was also "entirely too complicated" to use. The Army turned its attention to further upgraded versions of their existing prototypes, replacing the older vector bombsight mechanisms with the new synchronous method of measuring the proper dropping angle.

Fully automatic bombsight
While the Mk. XI was reaching its final design, the Navy learned of the Army's efforts to develop a synchronous bombsight, and asked Norden to design one for them. Norden was initially unconvinced this was workable, but the Navy persisted and offered him a development contract in June 1929. Norden retreated to his mother's house in Zürich and returned in 1930 with a working prototype. Lieutenant Frederick Entwistle, the Navy's chief of bombsight development, judged it revolutionary.

The new design, the Mark XV, was delivered in production quality in the summer of 1931. In testing, it proved to eliminate all of the problems of the earlier Mk. XI design. From 4000 ft altitude the prototype delivered a CEP of 35 ft, while even the latest production Mk. XI's were 55 ft. At higher altitudes, a series of 80 bomb runs demonstrated a CEP of 75 ft. In a test on 7 October 1931, the Mk. XV dropped 50% of its bombs on a static target, the USS Pittsburgh, while a similar aircraft with the Mk. XI had only 20% of its bombs hit.

Moreover, the new system was dramatically simpler to use. After locating the target in the sighting system, the bombardier simply made fine adjustments using two control wheels throughout the bomb run. There was no need for external calculation, lookup tables or pre-run measurements – everything was carried out automatically through an internal wheel-and-disc calculator. The calculator took a short time to settle on a solution, with setups as short as six seconds, compared to the 50 needed for the Mk. XI to measure its ground speed. In most cases, the bomb run needed to be only 30 seconds long.

Despite this success, the design also demonstrated several serious problems. In particular, the gyroscopic platform had to be levelled out before use using several spirit levels, and then checked and repeatedly reset for accuracy. Worse, the gyros had a limited degree of movement, and if the plane banked far enough the gyro would reach its limit and have to be re-set from scratch – something that could happen even due to strong turbulence. If the gyros were found to be off, the levelling procedure took as long as eight minutes. Other minor problems were the direct current electric motors which drove the gyroscopes, whose brushes wore down quickly and left carbon dust throughout the interior of the device, and the positioning of the control knobs, which meant the bombardier could only adjust side-to-side or up-and-down aim at a time, not both. But despite all of these problems, the Mark XV was so superior to any other design that the Navy ordered it into production.

Carl L. Norden Company was incorporated in 1931, supplying the sights under a dedicated source contract. In effect, the company was owned by the Navy. In 1934 the newly-forming GHQ Air Force, the purchasing arm of the U.S. Army Air Corps, selected the Norden for their bombers as well, referring to it as the M-1. However, due to the dedicated source contract, the Army had to buy the sights from the Navy. This was not only annoying for inter-service rivalry reasons, but the Air Corps' higher-speed bombers demanded several changes to the design, notably the ability to aim the sighting telescope further forward to give the bombardier more time to set up. The Navy was not interested in these changes, and would not promise to work them into the production lines. Worse, Norden's factories were having serious problems keeping up with demand for the Navy alone, and in January 1936, the Navy suspended all shipments to the Army.

Autopilot
Mk. XV's were initially installed with the same automatic PDI as the earlier Mk. XI. In practice, it was found that the pilots had a very difficult time keeping the aircraft stable enough to match the accuracy of the bombsight. Starting in 1932 and proceeding in fits and starts for the next six years, Norden developed the Stabilized Bombing Approach Equipment (SBAE), a mechanical autopilot that attached to the bombsight. However, it was not a true "autopilot", in that it could not fly the aircraft by itself. By rotating the bombsight in relationship to the SBAE, the SBAE could account for wind and turbulence and calculate the appropriate directional changes needed to bring the aircraft onto the bomb run far more precisely than a human pilot. The minor adaptations needed on the bombsight itself produced what the Army referred to as the M-4 model.

In 1937 the Army, faced with the continuing supply problems with the Norden, once again turned to Sperry Gyroscope to see if they could come up with a solution. Their earlier models had all proved unreliable, but they had continued working with the designs throughout this period and had addressed many of the problems. By 1937, Orland Esval had introduced a new AC-powered electrical gyroscope that spun at 30,000 RPM, compared to the Norden's 7,200 , which dramatically improved the performance of the inertial platform. The use of three-phase AC power and inductive pickup eliminated the carbon brushes, and further simplified the design. Carl Frische had developed a new system to automatically level the platform, eliminating the time-consuming process needed on the Norden. The two collaborated on a new design, adding a second gyro to handle heading changes, and named the result the Sperry S-1. Existing supplies of Nordens continued to be supplied to the USAAC's B-17s, while the S-1 equipped the B-24Es being sent to the 15th Air Force.

Some B-17s had been equipped with a simple heading-only autopilot, the Sperry A-3. The company had also been working on an all-electronic model, the A-5, which stabilized in all three directions. By the early 1930s, it was being used in a variety of Navy aircraft to excellent reviews. By connecting the outputs of the S-1 bombsight to the A-5 autopilot, Sperry produced a system similar to the M-4/SBAE, but it reacted far more quickly. The combination of the S-1 and A-5 so impressed the Army that on 17 June 1941 they authorized the construction of a 186000 m2 factory and noted that "in the future all production models of bombardment airplanes be equipped with the A-5 Automatic Pilot and have provisions permitting the installation of either the M-Series [Norden] Bombsight or the S-1 Bombsight".

British interest, Tizard mission
By 1938, information about the Norden had worked its way up the Royal Air Force chain of command and was well known within that organization. The British had been developing a tachometric bombsight of their own known as the Automatic Bomb Sight, but combat experience in 1939 demonstrated the need for it to be stabilized. Work was underway as the Stabilized Automatic Bomb Sight (SABS), but it would not be available until 1940 at the earliest, and likely later. Even then, it did not feature the autopilot linkage of the Norden, and would thus find it difficult to match the Norden's performance in anything but smooth air. Acquiring the Norden became a major goal.

The RAF's first attempt, in the spring of 1938, was rebuffed by the U.S. Navy. Air Chief Marshal Edgar Ludlow-Hewitt, commanding RAF Bomber Command, demanded Air Ministry action. They wrote to George Pirie, the British air attaché in Washington, suggesting he approach the U.S. Army with an offer of an information exchange with their own SABS. Pirie replied that he had already looked into this, and was told that the U.S. Army had no licensing rights to the device as it was owned by the U.S. Navy. The matter was not helped by a minor diplomatic issue that flared up in July when a French air observer was found to be on board a crashed Douglas Aircraft Company bomber, forcing President Roosevelt to promise no further information exchanges with foreign powers.

Six months later, after a change of leadership within the U.S. Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics, on 8 March 1939, Pirie was once again instructed to ask the U.S. Navy about the Norden, this time enhancing the deal with offers of British power-operated turrets. However, Pirie expressed concern as he noted the Norden had become as much political as technical, and its relative merits were being publicly debated in Congress weekly while the U.S. Navy continued to say the Norden was "the United States' most closely guarded secret".

The RAF's desires were only further goaded on 13 April 1939, when Pirie was invited to watch an air demonstration at Fort Benning where the painted outline of a battleship was the target:

"At 1:27 while everyone was still searching [the sky for the B-17s] six 300 lb bombs suddenly burst at split second intervals on the deck of the battleship, and it was at least 30 seconds later before someone spotted the B-17 at 12000 ft"

The three following B-17s also hit the target, and then a flight of a dozen Douglas B-18 Bolos placed most of their bombs in a separate 600 x square outlined on the ground.

Another change of management within the Bureau of Aeronautics had the effect of making the U.S. Navy more friendly to British overtures, but no one was willing to fight the political battle needed to release the design. The Navy brass was concerned that giving the Norden to the RAF would increase its chances of falling into German hands, which could put the U.S.'s own fleet at risk. The UK Air Ministry continued increasing pressure on Pirie, who eventually stated there was simply no way for him to succeed, and suggested the only way forward would be through the highest diplomatic channels in the Foreign Office. Initial probes in this direction were also rebuffed. When a report stated that the Norden's results were three to four times as good as their own bombsights, the Air Ministry decided to sweeten the pot and suggested they offer information on radar in exchange. This too was rebuffed.

The matter eventually worked its way to the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, who wrote personally to President Roosevelt asking for the Norden, but even this was rejected. The reason for these rejections was more political than technical, but the U.S. Navy's demands for secrecy were certainly important. They repeated that the design would be released only if the British could demonstrate the basic concept was common knowledge, and therefore not a concern if it fell into German hands. The British failed to convince them, even after offering to equip their examples with a variety of self-destruct devices.

This may have been ameliorated by the winter of 1939, at which point a number of articles about the Norden appeared in the U.S. popular press with reasonably accurate descriptions of its basic workings. But when these were traced back to the press corps at the U.S. Army Air Corps, the U.S. Navy was apoplectic. Instead of accepting it was now in the public domain, any discussion about the Norden was immediately shut down. This drove both the British Air Ministry and Royal Navy to increasingly anti-American attitudes when they considered sharing their own developments, notably newer ASDIC systems. By 1940 the situation on scientific exchange was entirely deadlocked as a result.

Looking for ways around the deadlock, Henry Tizard sent Archibald Vivian Hill to the U.S. to take a survey of U.S. technical capability in order to better assess what technologies the U.S. would be willing to exchange. This effort was the start on the path that led to the famous Tizard Mission in late August 1940. Ironically, by the time the Mission was being planned, the Norden had been removed from the list of items to be discussed, and Roosevelt personally noted this was due largely to political reasons. Ultimately, although Tizard was unable to convince the U.S. to release the design, he was able to request information about its external dimensions and details on the mounting system so it could be easily added to British bombers if it were released in the future.

Production, problems, and Army standardization

The conversion of Norden Laboratories Corporation's New York City engineering lab to a production factory was a long process. Before the war, skilled craftsmen, most of them German or Italian immigrants, hand-made almost every part of the 2,000-part machine. Between 1932 and 1938, the company produced only 121 bombsights per year. During the first year after the Attack on Pearl Harbor, Norden produced 6,900 bombsights, three-quarters of which went to the U.S. Navy.

When Norden heard of the U.S. Army's dealings with Sperry, Theodore Barth called a meeting with the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy at their factory in New York City. Barth offered to build an entirely new factory just to supply the U.S. Army, but the U.S. Navy refused this. Instead, the U.S. Army suggested that Norden adapt their sight to work with Sperry's A-5, which Barth refused. Norden actively attempted to make the bombsight incompatible with the A-5.

It was not until 1942 that the impasse was finally solved by farming out autopilot production to Honeywell Regulator, who combined features of the Norden-mounted SBAE with the aircraft-mounted A-5 to produce what the U.S. Army referred to as "Automatic Flight Control Equipment" (AFCE); the unit would later be redesigned as the C-1. The Norden, now connected with the aircraft's built-in autopilot, allowed the bombardier alone to fully control minor movements of the aircraft during the bombing run.

By May 1943 the U.S. Navy was complaining that they had a surplus of devices, with full production turned over to the USAAF. After investing more than $100 million in Sperry bombsight manufacturing plants, the USAAF concluded that the Norden M-series was far superior in accuracy, dependability, and design. Sperry contracts were cancelled in November 1943. When production ended a few months later, 5,563 Sperry bombsight-autopilot combinations had been built, most of which were installed in Consolidated B-24 Liberator bombers.

Expansion of Norden bombsight production to a final total of six factories took several years. The USAAF demanded additional production to meet their needs, and eventually arranged for the Victor Adding Machine company to gain a manufacturing license, and then Remington Rand. Ironically, during this period the U.S. Navy abandoned the Norden in favor of dive bombing, reducing the demand. By the end of the war, Norden and its subcontractors had produced 72,000 M-9 bombsights for the U.S. Army Air Force alone, costing $8,800 each.

Background
Typical bombsights of the pre-war era worked on the "vector bombsight" principle introduced with the World War I Course Setting Bomb Sight. These systems consisted of a slide rule-type calculator that was used to calculate the effects of the wind on the bomber based on simple vector arithmetic. The mathematical principles are identical to those on the E6B calculator used to this day.

In operation, the bombardier would first take a measurement of the wind speed using one of a variety of methods, and then dial that speed and direction into the bombsight. This would move the sights to indicate the direction the plane should fly to take it directly over the target with any cross-wind taken into account, and also set the angle of the iron sights to account for the wind's effect on ground speed.

These systems had two primary problems in terms of accuracy. The first was that there were several steps that had to be carried out in sequence in order to set up the bombsight correctly, and there was limited time to do all of this during the bomb run. As a result, the accuracy of the wind measurement was always limited, and errors in setting the equipment or making the calculations were common. The second problem was that the sight was attached to the aircraft, and thus moved about during maneuvers, during which time the bombsight would not point at the target. As the aircraft had to maneuver in order to make the proper approach, this limited the time allowed to accurately make corrections. This combination of issues demanded a long bomb run.

Experiments had shown that adding a stabilizer system to a vector bombsight would roughly double the accuracy of the system. This would allow the bombsight to remain level while the aircraft maneuvered, giving the bombardier more time to make his adjustments, as well as reducing or eliminating mis-measurements when sighting off of non-level sights. However, this would not have any effect on the accuracy of the wind measurements, nor the calculation of the vectors. The Norden attacked all of these problems.

Basic operation
To improve the calculation time, the Norden used a mechanical computer inside the bombsight to calculate the range angle of the bombs. By simply dialing in the aircraft's altitude and heading, along with estimates of the wind speed and direction (in relation to the aircraft), the computer would automatically, and quickly, calculate the aim point. This not only reduced the time needed for the bombsight setup but also dramatically reduced the chance for errors. This attack on the accuracy problem was by no means unique; several other bombsights of the era used similar calculators. It was the way the Norden used these calculations that differed.

Conventional bombsights are set up pointing at a fixed angle, the range angle, which accounts for the various effects on the trajectory of the bomb. To the operator looking through the sights, the crosshairs indicate the location on the ground the bombs would impact if released at that instant. As the aircraft moves forward, the target approaches the crosshairs from the front, moving rearward, and the bombardier releases the bombs as the target passes through the line of the sights. One example of a highly automated system of this type was the RAF's Mark XIV bomb sight.

The Norden worked in an entirely different fashion, based on the "synchronous" or "tachometric" method. Internally, the calculator continually computed the impact point, as was the case for previous systems. However, the resulting range angle was not displayed directly to the bombardier or dialed into the sights. Instead, the bombardier used the sighting telescope to locate the target long in advance of the drop point. A separate section of the calculator used the inputs for altitude and airspeed to determine the angular velocity of the target, the speed at which it would be seen drifting backward due to the forward motion of the aircraft. The output of this calculator drove a rotating prism at that angular speed in order to keep the target centered in the telescope. In a properly adjusted Norden, the target remains motionless in the sights.

The Norden thus calculated two angles: the range angle based on the altitude, airspeed and ballistics; and the current angle to the target, based on the ground speed and heading of the aircraft. The difference between these two angles represented the "correction" that needed to be applied to bring the aircraft over the proper drop point. If the aircraft was properly aligned with the target on the bomb run, the difference between the range and target angles would be continually reduced, eventually to zero (within the accuracy of the mechanisms). At this moment the Norden automatically dropped the bombs.

In practice, the target failed to stay centered in the sighting telescope when it was first set up. Instead, due to inaccuracies in the estimated wind speed and direction, the target would drift in the sight. To correct for this, the bombardier would use fine-tuning controls to slowly cancel out any motion through trial and error. These adjustments had the effect of updating the measured ground speed used to calculate the motion of the prisms, slowing the visible drift. Over a short period of time of continual adjustments, the drift would stop, and the bombsight would now hold an extremely accurate measurement of the exact ground speed and heading. Better yet, these measurements were being carried out on the bomb run, not before it, and helped eliminate inaccuracies due to changes in the conditions as the aircraft moved. And by eliminating the manual calculations, the bombardier was left with much more time to adjust his measurements, and thus settle at a much more accurate result.

The angular speed of the prism changes with the range of the target: consider the reverse situation, the apparent high angular speed of an aircraft passing overhead compared to its apparent speed when it is seen at a longer distance. In order to properly account for this non-linear effect, the Norden used a system of slip-disks similar to those used in differential analysers. However, this slow change at long distances made it difficult to fine-tune the drift early in the bomb run. In practice, bombardiers would often set up their ground speed measurements in advance of approaching the target area by selecting a convenient "target" on the ground that was closer to the bomber and thus had more obvious motion in the sight. These values would then be used as the initial setting when the target was later sighted.

System description
The Norden bombsight consisted of two primary parts, the gyroscopic stabilization platform on the left side, and the mechanical calculator and sighting head on the right side. They were essentially separate instruments, connecting through the sighting prism. The sighting eyepiece was located in the middle, between the two, in a less than convenient location that required some dexterity to use.

Before use, the Norden's stabilization platform had to be righted, as it slowly drifted over time and no longer kept the sight pointed vertically. Righting was accomplished through a time-consuming process of comparing the platform's attitude to small spirit levels seen through a glass window on the front of the stabilizer. In practice, this could take as long as eight and a half minutes. This problem was made worse by the fact that the platform's range of motion was limited, and could be tumbled even by strong turbulence, requiring it to be reset again. This problem seriously upset the usefulness of the Norden, and led the RAF to reject it once they received examples in 1942. Some versions included a system that quickly righted the platform, but this "Automatic Gyro Leveling Device" proved to be a maintenance problem, and was removed from later examples.

Once the stabilizer was righted, the bombardier would then dial in the initial setup for altitude, speed, and direction. The prism would then be "clutched out" of the computer, allowing it to be moved rapidly to search for the target on the ground. Later Nordens were equipped with a reflector sight to aid in this step. Once the target was located the computer was clutched in and started moving the prism to follow the target. The bombardier would begin making adjustments to the aim. As all of the controls were located on the right, and had to be operated while sighting through the telescope, another problem with the Norden is that the bombardier could only adjust either the vertical or horizontal aim at a given time, his other arm was normally busy holding himself up above the telescope.

On top of the device, to the right of the sight, were two final controls. The first was the setting for "trail", which was pre-set at the start of the mission for the type of bombs being used. The second was the "index window" which displayed the aim point in numerical form. The bombsight calculated the current aim point internally and displayed this as a sliding pointer on the index. The current sighting point, where the prism was aimed, was also displayed against the same scale. In operation, the sight would be set far in advance of the aim point, and as the bomber approached the target the sighting point indicator would slowly slide toward the aim point. When the two met, the bombs were automatically released. The aircraft was moving over 350 ft/s, so even minor interruptions in timing could dramatically affect aim.

Early examples, and most used by the Navy, had an output that directly drove a Pilot Direction Indicator meter in the cockpit. This eliminated the need to manually signal the pilot, as well as eliminating the possibility of error.

In U.S. Army Air Forces use, the Norden bombsight was attached to its autopilot base, which was in turn connected with the aircraft's autopilot. The Honeywell C-1 autopilot could be used as an autopilot by the flight crew during the journey to the target area through a control panel in the cockpit, but was more commonly used under direct command of the bombardier. The Norden's box-like autopilot unit sat behind and below the sight and attached to it at a single rotating pivot. After control of the aircraft was passed to the bombardier during the bomb run, he would first rotate the entire Norden so the vertical line in the sight passed through the target. From that point on, the autopilot would attempt to guide the bomber so it followed the course of the bombsight, and pointed the heading to zero out the drift rate, fed to it through a coupling. As the aircraft turned onto the correct angle, a belt and pulley system rotated the sight back to match the changing heading. The autopilot was another reason for the Norden's accuracy, as it ensured the aircraft quickly followed the correct course and kept it on that course much more accurately than the pilots could.

Later in the war, the Norden was combined with other systems to widen the conditions for successful bombing. Notable among these was the radar system called the H2X (Mickey), which were used directly with the Norden bombsight. The radar proved most accurate in coastal regions, as the water surface and the coastline produced a distinctive radar echo.

Early tests

The Norden bombsight was developed during a period of United States non-interventionism when the dominant U.S. military strategy was the defense of the U.S. and its possessions. A considerable amount of this strategy was based on stopping attempted invasions by sea, both with direct naval power, and starting in the 1930s, with USAAC airpower. Most air forces of the era invested heavily in dive bombers or torpedo bombers for these roles, but these aircraft generally had limited range; long-range strategic reach would require the use of an aircraft carrier. The Army felt the combination of the Norden and B-17 Flying Fortress presented an alternate solution, believing that small formations of B-17s could successfully attack shipping at long distances from the USAAC's widespread bases. The high altitudes the Norden allowed would help increase the range of the aircraft, especially if equipped with a turbocharger, as with each of the four Wright Cyclone 9 radial engines of the B-17.

In 1940, Barth claimed that "we do not regard a 15 foot (4.6 m) square... as being a very difficult target to hit from an altitude of 30000 ft". At some point the company started using the pickle barrel imagery, to reinforce the bombsight's reputation. After the device became known about publicly in 1942, the Norden company in 1943 rented Madison Square Garden and folded their own show in between the presentations of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Their show involved dropping a wooden "bomb" into a pickle barrel, at which point a pickle popped out.

These claims were greatly exaggerated; in 1940 the average score for an Air Corps bombardier was a circular error of 400 ft from 15000 ft, not 15 ft from 30000 ft. Real-world performance was poor enough that the Navy de-emphasized level attacks in favor of dive bombing almost immediately. The Grumman TBF Avenger could mount the Norden, like the preceding Douglas TBD Devastator, but combat use was disappointing and eventually described as "hopeless" during the Guadalcanal Campaign. In spite of giving up on the device in 1942, bureaucratic inertia meant they were supplied as standard equipment until 1944.

USAAF anti-shipping operations in the Far East were generally unsuccessful. In early operations during the Battle of the Philippines, B-17s claimed to have sunk one minesweeper and damaged two Japanese transports, the cruiser JAPANESE CRUISER Naka, and the destroyer JAPANESE DESTROYER Murasame. However, all of these ships are known to have suffered no damage from air attack during that period. In other early battles, including the Battle of Coral Sea or Battle of Midway, no claims were made at all, although some hits were seen on docked targets. The USAAF eventually replaced all of their anti-shipping B-17s with other aircraft, and came to use the skip bombing technique in direct low-level attacks.

Air war in Europe
As U.S. participation in the war started, the U.S. Army Air Forces drew up widespread and comprehensive bombing plans based on the Norden. They believed the B-17 had a 1.2% probability of hitting a 100 ft target from 20000 ft, meaning that 220 bombers would be needed for a 93% probability of one or more hits. This was not considered a problem, and the USAAF forecast the need for 251 combat groups to provide enough bombers to fulfill their comprehensive pre-war plans.

After earlier combat trials proved troublesome, the Norden bombsight and its associated AFCE were used on a wide scale for the first time on the 18 March 1943 mission to Bremen-Vegesack, Germany. The 303d Bombardment Group dropped 76% of its load within a 1000 ft ring, representing a CEP well under 1000 ft. As at sea, many early missions over Europe demonstrated varied results; on wider inspection, only 50% of American bombs fell within a 1/4 mi of the target, and American flyers estimated that as many as 90% of bombs could miss their targets. The average CEP in 1943 was 1200 ft, meaning that only 16% of the bombs fell within 1000 ft of the aiming point. A 500 lb bomb, standard for precision missions after 1943, had a lethal radius of only 60 to 90 ft.

Faced with these poor results, Curtis LeMay started a series of reforms in an effort to address the problems. In particular, he introduced the "combat box" formation in order to provide maximum defensive firepower by densely packing the bombers. As part of this change, he identified the best bombardiers in his command and assigned them to the lead bomber of each box. Instead of every bomber in the box using their Norden individually, the lead bombardiers were the only ones actively using the Norden, and the rest of the box's aircraft dropped their bombs when they saw the lead's bombs leaving his aircraft. Although this spread the bombs over the area of the combat box, this could still improve accuracy over individual efforts. It also helped stop a problem where various aircraft, all slaved to their autopilots on the same target, would drift into each other. These changes did improve accuracy, which suggests that much of the problem is attributable to the bombardier. However, true "precision" attacks still proved difficult or impossible.

When Jimmy Doolittle took over command of the 8th Air Force from Ira Eaker in early 1944, precision bombing attempts were dropped. Area bombing, like the RAF efforts, were widely used with 750 and then 1,000-bomber raids against large targets. The main targets were railroad marshaling yards (27.4% of the bomb tonnage dropped), airfields (11.6%), oil refineries (9.5%), and military installations (8.8%). To some degree, the targets themselves were secondary; Doolittle used the bombers as an irresistible target to draw up Luftwaffe fighters into the ever-increasing swarms of Allied long-range escort fighters. As these missions broke the Luftwaffe, missions were able to be carried out at lower altitudes or especially in bad weather when the H2X radar could be used. In spite of abandoning precision attacks, accuracy nevertheless improved. By 1945, the 8th was putting up to 60% of its bombs within 1000 ft, a CEP of about 900 ft.

Still pursuing precision attacks, various remotely guided weapons were developed, notably the AZON and VB-3 Razon bombs and similar weapons.

Adaptations
The Norden operated by mechanically turning the viewpoint so the target remained stationary in the display. The mechanism was designed for the low angular rate encountered at high altitudes, and thus had a relatively low range of operational speeds. The Norden could not rotate the sight fast enough for bombing at low altitude, for instance. Typically this was solved by removing the Norden completely and replacing it with simpler sighting systems.

A good example of its replacement was the refitting of the Doolittle Raiders with a simple iron sight. Designed by Capt. C. Ross Greening, the sight was mounted to the existing pilot direction indicator, allowing the bombardier to make corrections remotely, like the bombsights of an earlier era.

However, the Norden combined two functions, aiming and stabilization. While the former was not useful at low altitudes, the latter could be even more useful, especially if flying in rough air near the surface. This led James "Buck" Dozier to mount a Doolittle-like sight on top of the stabilizer in the place of the sighting head in order to attack German submarines in the Caribbean Sea. This proved extraordinarily useful and was soon used throughout the fleet.

Postwar use
In the postwar era, the United States mostly stopped developing new precision bombsights. Initially this was because of the war's end but, as budgets increased during the Cold War, the deployment of nuclear weapons meant accuracies of around 3000 yd were sufficient, well within the capabilities of existing radar bombing systems. Only one major bombsight of note was developed, the Y-4 developed on the Boeing B-47 Stratojet. This sight combined the images of the radar and a lens system in front of the aircraft, allowing them to be directly compared at once through a binocular eyepiece.

Bombsights on older aircraft, like the Boeing B-29 Superfortress and the later B-50, were left in their wartime state. When the Korean War began, these aircraft were pressed into service and the Norden once again became the USAF's primary bombsight. This occurred again when the Vietnam War started; in this case retired World War II technicians had to be called up in order to make the bombsights operational again. Its last use in combat was by the Naval Air Observation Squadron Sixty-Seven (VO-67), during the Vietnam War. The bombsights were used in Operation Igloo White for implanting Air-Delivered Seismic Intrusion Detectors (ADSID) along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Wartime security

Since the Norden was considered a critical wartime instrument, bombardiers were required to take an oath during their training stating that they would defend its secret with their own life if necessary. In case the plane should make an emergency landing on enemy territory, the bombardier would have to shoot the important parts of the Norden with a gun to disable it. The Douglas TBD Devastator torpedo bomber was originally equipped with flotation bags in the wings to aid the aircrew's escape after ditching, but they were removed once the Pacific War began; this ensured that the aircraft would sink, taking the Norden with it.

After each completed mission, bomber crews left the aircraft with a bag which they deposited in a safe ("the Bomb Vault"). This secure facility ("the AFCE and Bombsight Shop") was typically in one of the base's Nissen hut (Quonset hut) support buildings. The Bombsight Shop was manned by enlisted men who were members of a Supply Depot Service Group ("Sub Depot") attached to each USAAF bombardment group. These shops not only guarded the bombsights but performed critical maintenance on the Norden and related control equipment. This was probably the most technically skilled ground-echelon job, and certainly the most secret, of all the work performed by Sub Depot personnel. The non-commissioned officer in charge and his staff had to have a high aptitude for understanding and working with mechanical devices.

As the end of World War II neared, the bombsight was gradually downgraded in its secrecy; however, it was not until 1944 that the first public display of the instrument occurred.

Espionage

Despite the security precautions, the entire Norden system had been passed to the Germans before the war started. Herman W. Lang, a German spy, had been employed by the Carl L. Norden Company. During a visit to Germany in 1938, Lang conferred with German military authorities and reconstructed plans of the confidential materials from memory. In 1941, Lang, along with the 32 other German agents of the Duquesne Spy Ring, was arrested by the FBI and convicted in the largest espionage prosecution in U.S. history. He received a sentence of 18 years in prison on espionage charges and a two-year concurrent sentence under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

German instruments were fairly similar to the Norden, even before World War II. A similar set of gyroscopes provided a stabilized platform for the bombardier to sight through, although the complex interaction between the bombsight and autopilot was not used. The Carl Zeiss Lotfernrohr 7, or Lotfe 7, was an advanced mechanical system similar to the Norden bombsight, although in form it was more similar to the Sperry S-1. It started replacing the simpler Lotfernrohr 3 and BZG 2 in 1942, and emerged as the primary late-war bombsight used in most Luftwaffe level bombers. The use of the autopilot allowed single-handed operation, and was key to bombing use of the single-crewed Arado Ar 234.

Japanese forces captured examples of the Norden, primarily from North American B-25 Mitchell bombers. They developed a simplified and more compact version known as the Type 4 Automatic Bombing Sight, but found it too complex to mass produce. Further development led to the Type 1 Model 2 Automatic Bombing Sight which began limited production just before the end of the war. Approximately 20 were in service at the end of the war.

Postwar analysis
Postwar analysis placed the overall accuracy of daylight precision attacks with the Norden at about the same level as radar bombing efforts. The 8th Air Force put 31.8% of its bombs within 1000 ft from an average altitude of 21000 ft, the 15th Air Force averaged 30.78% from 20500 ft, and the 20th Air Force against Japan averaged 31% from 16500 ft.

Many factors have been put forth to explain the Norden's poor real-world performance. Over Europe, the cloud cover was a common explanation, although performance did not improve even in favorable conditions. Over Japan, bomber crews soon discovered strong winds at high altitudes, the so-called jet streams, but the Norden bombsight worked only for wind speeds with minimal wind shear. Additionally, the bombing altitude over Japan reached up to 30000 ft, but most of the testing had been done well below 20000 ft. This extra altitude compounded factors that could previously be ignored; the shape of and even the paint on the bomb changed its aerodynamic properties and, at that time, nobody knew how to calculate the trajectory of bombs that reached supersonic speeds during their fall.

The RAF developed their own designs. Having moved to night bombing, where visual accuracy was difficult under even the best conditions, they introduced the much simpler Mark XIV bomb sight. This was designed not for accuracy above all, but ease of use in operational conditions. In testing in 1944, it was found to offer a CEP of 270 m, about what the Norden was offering at that time. This led to a debate within the RAF whether to use their own tachometric design, the Stabilized Automatic Bomb Sight, or use the Mk. XIV on future bombers. The Mk. XIV ultimately served into the 1960s while the SABS faded from service as the Lancaster and Lincoln bombers fitted with it were retired by the late 1940s.

title: Norden bombsight


text:
Rhythm 0

Rhythm 0 was a six-hour long endurance art performed by the Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović in Naples in 1974. The work involved Abramović standing still while the audience was invited to do to her whatever they wished, using one of 72 objects she had placed on a table. These included a rose, feather, perfume, honey, bread, grapes, wine, scissors, a scalpel, nails, a metal bar, a gun, and a bullet.

There were no separate stages. Abramović and the visitors stood in the same space, making it clear that the latter were part of the work. The purpose of the piece, she said, was to find out how far the public would go: "What is the public about and what are they going to do in this kind of situation?"

Performance
Her instructions were

"Instructions: There are 72 objects on the table that one can use on me as desired. Performance. I am the object... During this period I take full responsibility. Duration: 6 hours (8 pm – 2 am)."

Abramović said the work "pushed her body to the limits". Visitors were gentle to begin with, offering her a rose or a kiss. Art critic Thomas McEvilley, who was present, wrote:

"It began tamely. Someone turned her around. Someone thrust her arms into the air. Someone touched her somewhat intimately. The Neapolitan night began to heat up. In the third hour all her clothes were cut from her with razor sharp blades. In the fourth hour the same blades began to explore her skin. Her throat was slashed so someone could suck her blood. Various minor sexual assaults were carried out on her body. She was so committed to the piece that she would not have resisted rape or murder. Faced with her abdication of will, with its implied collapse of human psychology, a protective group began to define itself in the audience. When a loaded gun was thrust to Marina's head and her own finger was being worked around the trigger, a fight broke out between the audience factions.'"

As Abramović described it later: "What I learned was that ... if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you ... I felt really violated: they cut up my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation."

Reception
Rhythm 0 ranked ninth among the all-time best performance art pieces in a 2013 list by Complex magazine.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Rhythm 0


text:
Jean-Baptiste Drouet, Comte d'Erlon

Jean-Baptiste Drouet, Comte d'Erlon (29 July 1765 – 25 January 1844) was a Marshal of France and a soldier in the Grande Armée during the Napoleonic Wars. He notably commanded the I Corps of the Army of the North at the Battle of Waterloo.

Early life
D'Erlon was born in Reims on 29 July 1765. His father and grandfather were carpenters, and he trained to be a locksmith.

Revolutionary Wars
D'Erlon entered the army as a private soldier in 1782, was discharged after five years’ service and re-entered it in 1792. In 1792 he served as a corporal in the pre-revolutionary army, being elected to captain the following year.

From 1794 to 1796 he was aide-de-camp to General Lefebvre. In 1799 he was promoted to brigadier general, and fought under André Masséna in Switzerland. The same year he distinguished himself at the Second Battle of Zurich.

He continued his service in many battles of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, including the Battle of Hohenlinden (3rd December 1800, in which he was wounded), the Hanover region (earning him promotion to major general in 1803).

Napoleonic Wars
As a general of division he took part in Napoleon's campaigns of 1805 and 1806. At the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805, his division played a pivotal role, and he rendered excellent service at Jena in 1806.

In 1807, as chief of staff for Lefebvre at the siege of Danzig (now Gdańsk), he negotiated the terms of surrender. The same year he was wounded in the foot at Friedland. After this battle he was made grand officer of the Legion of Honour, was created Count d’Erlon and received a pension.

Following the conclusion of the 1809 Danubian campaign, D'Erlon was sent as chief of staff to Marshal Lefebvre. Lefebvre was in command of the VII (Bavarian) Corps in action in the Tyrolean Rebellion against the pro-Austrian insurgency led by the innkeeper Andreas Hofer. After the failure of the allied second offensive to retake the Tyrol, Lefebvre was relieved of his command by Napoleon because of his poor performance and terrible relationship with the Bavarians. D'Erlon was given command, and in by the end of November he had pacified the region, and in the process formed a strong bond with his Bavarian subordinates.

For the next six years d'Erlon was almost continuously engaged as commander of an army corps in the Peninsular War, in which he added greatly to his reputation as a capable general. He arrived in the Peninsula as commander of the IX Corps, and at the pass of Maya in the Pyrenees defeated the British General Hill. In the subsequent battles of the 1814 campaign he distinguished himself further.

After Napoleon abdicated in 1814 d'Erlon transferred his allegiance to the House of Bourbon along with the rest of the army and was given command of the 16th military division, but he was soon arrested for conspiring with the Orléans party, to which he was secretly devoted. He escaped and joined Napoleon, who had returned from exile on the island of Elba.

Hundred Days
Napoleon made him a peer of France, and gave him command of the I Corps, which formed part of the Army of the North. On 16 June 1815 during the first major engagements of Waterloo campaign, due to conflicting orders his Corps spent the day on the Old Roman Road marching and counter-marching between the battles of Quatre Bras and Ligny without engaging in either battle. He was not, however, held to account by Napoleon, and as the latter's practice in such matters was severe to the verge of injustice, it may be presumed that the failure was not due to d’Erlon. If the I Corps had engaged in either battle the outcome of the campaign might have been different.

Two days later at the Battle of Waterloo it was his Corps in column formation which attacked the Allied centre right from La Haye Sainte to Papelotte at 13:30 and was stopped by Picton's Peninsular War veterans, and then attacked in the flanks by the British heavy cavalry. He retreated with the rest of the French army and fought in the closing operations around Paris. After the surrender of Napoleon, d'Erlon entered exile in Munich.

Post-Napoleonic service
In 1825 he was granted amnesty by Charles X. He supported July Revolution in 1830, and was made Peer of France in 19 November 1831. In 1832 he was given the command of the 12th Division in Nantes. Later in the year his division suppressed a Vendean revolt and arrested the Duchess of Berry.

In 1834 d'Erlon was named governor-general of Algeria. After the defeat of the French army under General Trézel at the Battle of Macta in 1835, D'Erlon was recalled to France and replaced.

From 1837 he resumed his command of the 12th Division in Nantes, a position he held until 1843 when he moved to Paris to retire and was granted the title marshal of France on 9 April 1843. He died on 25 January of the following year.

Family
In 1794, in Reims, d'Erlon married Marie-Anne de Rousseau (died 1828), daughter of Nicolas de Rousseau, a banker, whom he got to know through Marie-Jeanne (Rousseau) the wife of his brother Jean-François Drouet. While in Reims on the morning of his wedding, he was informed of his appointment as aide-de-camp to General François Lefebvre. On Christmas Day 1794, his first child, a son who was christened Nicolas Adolphe, was born. In 1796 his wife had their second child, a daughter: Marie-Anne Louise. His third child Aimé-Napoleon-François was born in Soissons in December 1803.

title: Jean-Baptiste Drouet, Comte d'Erlon


text:
Talk:Rank Preference Ballot

Thanks, merge done. --Tomruen 06:06, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

Note: needs merging with or links to/from Preferential_voting Pm67nz 05:53, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

title: Talk:Rank Preference Ballot


text:
Ghost (disk utility)

GHOST (an acronym for general hardware-oriented system transfer ), now Symantec™ GHOST Solution Suite (GSS) for enterprise, is a disk cloning and backup tool originally developed by Murray Haszard in 1995 for Binary Research. The technology was acquired in 1998 by Symantec.

The backup and recovery functionality was replaced by Symantec System Recovery (SSR).

Broadcom acquired Symantec's Enterprise Security business in 2019.

Features
GHOST is marketed as an OS deployment solution. Its capture and deployment environment requires booting to a Windows PE environment. This can be accomplished by creating an ISO (to burn to a DVD) or a USB bootable disk, installed to a client as an automation folder or delivered by a PXE server. This provides an environment to perform offline system recovery or image creation. GHOST can mount a backup volume to recover individual files.

GHOST can copy the contents of one volume to another or copy a volume's contents to a virtual disk in VMDK or VHD format.

Initially, GHOST supported only the FAT file system but could copy (not resize) other file systems by performing a sector-by-sector transfer. GHOST added support for NTFS later in 1996, and also provided a program, Ghostwalker, to change the Security ID (SID) that made Windows NT systems distinguishable from each other. Ghostwalker is capable of modifying the name of the Windows NT computer from its own interface. GHOST added support for the EXT2 file system in 1999 and for EXT3 subsequently. Support for EXT4 was added in September 2017 (Enterprise only).

Early versions
Binary Research developed GHOST in Auckland, New Zealand. After the Symantec acquisition, a few functions (such as translation into other languages) were moved elsewhere, but the main development remained in Auckland until October 2009 at which time much was moved to India.

Technologies developed by 20/20 Software were integrated into GHOST after their acquisition by Symantec in April 2000.

GHOST 1.0 and 2.0
GHOST 1.0 and 1.1 were released in 1996, followed by 2.0 (2.07) in the same year. These versions supported only the cloning of entire disks. They could run on an IBM XT and without extended memory. They also worked with OS/2.

GHOST 3.1
Version 3.1, released in 1997 supports cloning individual partitions. GHOST could clone a disk or partition to another disk or partition or to an image file. GHOST allows for writing a clone or image to a second disk in the same machine, another machine linked by a parallel or network cable, a network drive, or to a tape drive. 3.1 uses 286 with XMS and could still run on OS/2.

GHOST 4.0 and 4.1
Version 4.0 of GHOST added multicast technology, following the lead of a competitor, ImageCast. Multicasting supports sending a single backup image simultaneously to other machines without putting greater stress on the network than by sending an image to a single machine. This version also introduced GHOST Explorer, a Windows program which supports browsing the contents of a disk image file and extracting individual files from it. Explorer was subsequently enhanced to support adding and deleting files in a FAT-formatted image, and later with EXT2, EXT3 and NTFS file systems. Until 2007, GHOST Explorer could not edit NTFS images. GHOST Explorer could work with images from older versions but only slowly; version 4 images contain indexes to find files rapidly.

Version 4.0 also moved from real-mode DOS to 286 protected mode via Pharlap Extender. The additional memory available allows GHOST to provide several levels of compression for images, and to provide the file browser. In 1998, GHOST 4.1 supports password-protected images. This version dropped OS/2 support.

GHOST 5.0 (GHOST 2000)
Version 5.0 moved to 386 protected mode. Unlike the text-based user interface of earlier versions, 5.0 uses a graphical user interface (GUI). The Binary Research logo, two stars revolving around each other, plays on the main screen when the program is idle. In 1998, Gdisk, a script-based partition manager, was integrated in Ghost. Gdisk serves a role similar to Fdisk, but has greater capabilities.

GHOST for NetWare
A Norton GHOST version for Novell NetWare (called 2.0), released around 1999, supports NSS partitions (although it runs in DOS, like the others).

GHOST 6.0 (GHOST 2001)
GHOST 6.0, released in 2000, includes a management console for managing large numbers of machines. The console communicates with client software on managed computers and allows a system administrator to refresh the disk of a machine remotely. As a DOS-based program, GHOST requires machines running Windows to reboot to DOS to run it. GHOST 6.0 requires a separate DOS partition when used with the console.

GHOST 7.0 / GHOST 2002
Released March 31, 2001, Norton GHOST version 7.0 (retail) was marketed as Norton GHOST 2002 Personal Edition.

GHOST 7.5
Released December 14, 2001, GHOST 7.5 creates a virtual partition, a DOS partition which actually exists as a file within a normal Windows file system. This significantly eased systems management because the user no longer had to set up their own partition tables. GHOST 7.5 can write images to CD-R discs. Later versions can write DVDs.

Symantec GHOST 8.0
GHOST 8.0 can run directly from Windows. It is well-suited for placement on bootable media, such as BartPE′s bootable CD. The corporate edition supports unicast, multicast and peer-to-peer transfers via TCP/IP. GHOST 8.0 supports NTFS file system, although NTFS is not accessible from a DOS program.

Transition from DOS
The off-line version of Ghost, which runs from bootable media in place of the installed operating system, originally faced a number of driver support difficulties due to limitations of the increasingly obsolete 16-bit DOS environment. Driver selection and configuration within DOS was non-trivial from the beginning, and the limited space available on floppy disks made disk cloning of several different disk controllers a difficult task, where different SCSI, USB, and CD-ROM drives were involved. Mouse support was possible but often left out due to the limited space for drivers on a floppy disk. Some devices such as USB often did not work using newer features such as USB 2.0, instead only operating at 1.0 speeds and taking hours to do what should have taken only a few minutes. As widespread support for DOS went into decline, it became increasingly difficult to get hardware drivers for DOS for the newer hardware.

Disk imaging competitors to GHOST have dealt with the decline of DOS by moving to other recovery environments such as FreeBSD, Linux or Windows PE, where they can draw on current driver development to be able to image newer models of disk controllers. Nevertheless, the DOS version of GHOST on compatible hardware configurations works much faster than most of the *nix based image and backup tools.

GHOST 8 and later are Windows programs; as such, they can run on Windows PE, BartPE or Hiren's BootCD and use the same plug and play hardware drivers as a standard desktop computer, making hardware support for GHOST much simpler.

Norton GHOST 2003
Norton GHOST 2003, a consumer edition of Ghost, was released on September 6, 2002. Available as an independent product, Norton GHOST 2003 was also included as a component of Norton SystemWorks 2003 Professional. A simpler, non-corporate version of Ghost, Norton GHOST 2003 does not include the console but has a Windows front-end to script GHOST operations and create a bootable GHOST diskette. The machine still needs to reboot to the virtual partition, but the user does not need to interact with DOS. Symantec deprecated LiveUpdate support for Norton GHOST 2003 in early 2006.

Acquisition of PowerQuest
At the end of 2003, Symantec acquired its largest competitor in the disk-cloning field, PowerQuest. On August 2, 2004, Norton GHOST 9.0 was released as a new consumer version of Ghost, which is based on PowerQuest's Drive Image version 7, and provides Live imaging of a Windows system. GHOST 9 continues to leverage the PowerQuest (v2i) file format, meaning it is not backward compatible with previous versions of Ghost. However, a version of GHOST 8.0 is included on the GHOST 9 recovery disk to support existing GHOST customers.

GHOST split into two code bases following the acquisition of PowerQuest. The consumer line uses PowerQuest's V2I technology, while the enterprise line builds upon the original GHO format.

Norton GHOST 9.0 (includes GHOST 2003)
GHOST 9.0 was released August 2, 2004. It represents a significant shift in the consumer product line from GHOST 2003, in several ways:
 * It uses a totally different code base, based on the DriveImage/V2i Protector product via Symantec's acquisition of PowerQuest.
 * It is a Windows program that must be installed on the target system.
 * Images can be made while Windows is running, rather than only when booted directly into DOS mode.
 * Incremental images (containing only changes since the last image) are supported.
 * Requires Product Activation in order to function fully.
 * The bootable environment on the GHOST 9 CD is only useful for recovery of existing backups. It cannot be used to create new images.

Since GHOST 9 does not support the older .gho format disk images, a separate CD containing GHOST 2003 is included in the retail packaging for users needing to access those older images.

The limitations of GHOST 9 compared to GHOST 2003 were not well-communicated by Symantec, and resulted in many dissatisfied customers who purchased GHOST 9 expecting the previous version's features (like making images from the bootable GHOST environment, no installation required, and no product activation).

Norton GHOST 10.0
Released circa 2005. Supports creating images on CDs, DVDs, Iomega Zip and Jaz disks as well as IEEE 1394 (FireWire) and USB mass storage devices. Supports encrypting images and Maxtor external hard disk drives with Maxtor OneTouch buttons. GHOST 10.0 is compatible with previous versions, but not with future versions.

Norton Save And Restore 1.0 (GHOST 10.0)
Norton Save And Restore 1.0, released in February 2006, was the renamed consumer version of Ghost. It used GHOST 10.0's engine, with the addition of features to allow backup and restoration of individual files.

Norton GHOST 12.0
GHOST 12.0 (April 2007) includes Windows Vista support with an updated and more thorough user interface. It supports both full system backup and individual files or folders backup.

This version provides a "LightsOut Restore" feature, which restores a system from an on-disk software recovery environment similar to Windows RE, thereby allowing recovery without a bootable CD. Upon system startup, a menu asks whether start the operating system or the LightsOut recovery environment. LightsOut restore would augment the ISO image, which comes with Ghost. The latter contains a recovery environment that can recover a system without a working operating system.

Norton Save & Restore 2.0 (GHOST 13.0)
NSR 2.0 has fewer features in comparison to Norton GHOST 12. NSR 2.0 offers one-time backups, file and folder backup, simplified schedule editor, Maxtor OneTouch integration and modifiable Symantec recovery disc. This version supports 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows XP and Vista.

Norton GHOST 14.0
Version 14.0 (November 2007) uses Volume Snapshot Service (VSS) to make backups and can store backups to an FTP site. GHOST can connect to ThreatCon, a Symantec service that monitors malware activity around the world, and performs incremental backups when a specific threat level is reached. Other features include the ability to back up to network-attached storage devices and support for NTFS partitions up to 16TB. GHOST can manage other installations of version 12.0 or later across a network.

This version no longer supports opening .gho image files. It stores images in .v2i format. Incremental backup images created with Norton GHOST are saved with .iv2i filename extensions alone the original full backup (with .v2i filename extension) on a regular basis. Older .gho image files can be restored using GHOST Explorer, a separate utility.

Norton GHOST 15.0
According to the Norton community on Symantec's site, the following features are available in Norton GHOST 15 of April 2010:

Discontinuation
Norton GHOST was discontinued on April 30, 2013. Support via chat and knowledge base was available until June 30, 2014. Until it was removed, the Symantec GHOST Web page invited GHOST customers to try Symantec System Recovery, described as software for backup and disaster recovery.

Symantec GHOST Solution Suite 1.0 (GHOST 8.2)
Released November 15, 2004, Symantec renamed the Enterprise version of GHOST to Symantec GHOST Solution Suite 1.0. This helped clarify the difference between the consumer and business editions of the product. According to Symantec, Symantec GHOST and Norton GHOST are two separate product lines based around different technologies developed by different teams. This was further defined in February 2006, with the release of Norton Save And Restore (also known as Norton Backup And Restore), a standalone backup application based on GHOST 10.0.

Symantec GHOST Solution Suite 1.1 (GHOST 8.3)
GHOST Solution Suite 1.1 was released in December 2005. GHOST Solution Suite 1.1 is a bundle of an updated version of Ghost, Symantec Client Migration (a user data and settings migration tool) and the former PowerQuest equivalent, DeployCenter (using PQI images). It can create an image file that is larger than 2 GB. (In GHOST 8.2 or earlier, such image files are automatically split into two or more segments, so that each segment has a maximum size of 2 GB.) Other new features include more comprehensive manufacturing tools, and the ability to create a "universal boot disk".

Symantec GHOST Solution Suite 2.0 (GHOST 11.0)
GHOST Solution Suite 2.0 was released in November 2006. This version provides significant improvements in performance, as well as the ability to edit NTFS images. This version also adds support for Windows Vista, x64 versions of Windows, and GUID Partition Table (GPT) disks. However, the software does not fully support systems with Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) firmware.

GHOST 11.0 supports saving and restoring from native GHOST image format (.gho, .ghs) and raw images (.img, .raw).

Symantec GHOST Solution Suite 2.5 (GHOST 11.5)
The GHOST software for enterprise, including GHOST 11.5, was released in May 2008. New features include:

As of January 6, 2010, the latest build from Live Update is 11.5.1.2266 (Live Update 5 (LU5)). This updates GHOST Solution Suite to 2.5.1 and provides support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Furthermore, GHOST 11.5 is compatible with BartPE's bootable CD using a PE Builder plug-in for Symantec GHOST 11

Symantec GHOST Solution Suite 3.x (GHOST 12.0)
GSS 3.0, including GHOST 12.0 and Deployment Solution 6.9, was announced in March 2015.

GSS 3.1, including GHOST 12.0 and Deployment Solution 6.9, was released on 7 March 2016.

GSS 3.2, including GHOST 12.0 and Deployment Solution 6.9, was released on 18 May 2017. Release Update 3, which was released 22 September 2017, added support for the ext4 filesystem.

GSS 3.3, including GHOST 12.0 and Deployment Solution 6.9, was released on 31 October 2018. This release added support for GHOST Solution Suite Web Console, iPXE, Windows Server 2016, Smart raw imaging, and 4K native drive support.

title: Ghost (disk utility)


text:
Dewar

Dewar may refer to:

Other uses:
 * Clan Dewar
 * Dewar (caste), a fishing caste from India
 * Vacuum flask (also known as a Dewar flask), a vacuum-insulated container used to maintain internal temperature for extended periods, named for British chemist James Dewar
 * Cryogenic storage dewar, a specialised vacuum flask for extremely cold fluids
 * Dewar benzene, an isomer of benzene named for James Dewar
 * Dewar's, makers of a blended Scotch whisky, named for John Dewar and sons

People

 * Arthur Dewar, Lord Dewar (1860–1917), Scottish politician and judge.
 * Arthur Dewar (cricketer) (1934–2020), Scottish cricketer
 * Connor Dewar (born 1999), Canadian ice hockey player
 * Donald Dewar (Rt. Hon. Donald Campbell Dewar, 1937–2000), former Scottish politician and the first First Minister of Scotland
 * Douglas Dewar (1875–1957), British ornithologist and critic of the theory of evolution
 * Geordie Dewar (1867-1915), Scottish football player
 * George Dewar (disambiguation), various people
 * Isla Dewar (1946 – 2021), Scottish novelist and screenwriter
 * Jackie Dewar (1923–2011), Scottish footballer
 * Jacqueline Dewar, American mathematician
 * James Dewar (disambiguation)
 * Jim Dewar (disambiguation)
 * John Dewar, 1st Baron Forteviot (1856–1929), Scottish businessman and MP
 * John Dewar, 2nd Baron Forteviot (1885–1947), Scottish businessman and soldier
 * John Michael Dewar (1883–1941), Scottish ornithologist
 * Kenneth Dewar (1879–1964), Vice-Admiral of the Royal Navy
 * Kim Dewar, New Zealand swimmer
 * Marion Dewar (1928–2008), Mayor of Ottawa, Canada, and MP
 * Michael J. S. Dewar (1918-1997), English theoretical chemist
 * Neil Dewar (1908–1982), Scottish football player
 * Paul Dewar (1963–2019), Canadian teacher and MP
 * Thomas Dewar, 1st Baron Dewar (1864-1930), Scottish whisky distiller
 * William McLachlan Dewar, headmaster of George Heriot's School in Edinburgh, Scotland
 * Michael Kenneth O’Malley Dewar (1942–2016), chief of Clan Dewar

Places

 * Dewar (crater), a lunar impact crater
 * Dewar Nunatak, Adelaide Island, Antarctica
 * Dewar, Scottish Borders, Scotland
 * Dewar, Iowa, United States
 * Dewar, Oklahoma, United States
 * Dewar Creek, British Columbia, Canada

title: Dewar


text:
Grey-backed camaroptera

The grey-backed camaroptera (Camaroptera brevicaudata) is a small bird in the family Cisticolidae. This bird is a resident breeder in Africa south of the Sahara Desert. Recent studies suggest this species and the green-backed camaroptera may be the same species.

This skulking passerine is typically found low in dense cover. The grey-backed camaroptera binds large leaves together low in a bush and builds a grass nest within the leaves. The normal clutch is two or three eggs.

This 11.5 cm long warbler has grey upper parts and a grey short cocked tail. The wings are olive and the underparts whitish grey. The sexes are similar, but juveniles are paler yellow on the breast.

Like most warblers, grey-backed camaroptera is insectivorous. The call is a whining sheee...sheee and a bleating maa, that gave rise to its previous name bleating warbler or bleating camaroptera. The song is a crisp twik twik twik twik twik.

The grey-backed camaroptera was described by the German physician and zoologist Philipp Jakob Cretzschmar in 1830 under the binomial name Sylvia brevicaudata. The type locality is the former province of Kurdufan in Sudan. The specific epithet brevicaudata is from Latin brevis for "short" and caudatus for "-tailed". There are 11 recognised subspecies.

title: Grey-backed camaroptera


text:
User talk:SchroedingersCat

Thanks for experimenting with Wikipedia. Your test worked, and has been reverted or removed. Please use the sandbox for any other tests you want to do. Take a look at the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia. Thanks. Your damage to the articles will be easily repaired, but your vandalism will get you banned. --Humus sapiens|Talk 06:03, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

title: User talk:SchroedingersCat


text:
User:Vernon John De Nigel

Web Pages http://domainjuris.freewebpage.org

Host http://www.freewebpage.org/index.html

Login Page http://www.freewebpage.org/cgi-bin/home/login2

Server Contact Page http://www.freewebpage.org/contact.html

Interests University of Santa Monica Spiritual Psychology MA http://www.gousm.edu/

Prince Michael of Kent http://www.princemichael.org.uk/

Targets MSIA Pray List Submission: http://www.msia.org/msia.qry?ID=9

Notes: Introduction: In 2002 AD Vernon John D' Nigel procurred the following royal titles and their privilidge from Prince Alexander of England from his de jur selection of inherited rights which descend via his family line who were the original royal title holders and command bearers of the Outremer Kingdom found in circa 1100 AD by Godfrey De Bullion Duke of Lower Lorraine, Germany who through the first crusade became King of Israel. The titles obtained were as follows;

- Dukedom of Oultrejordain (now Jordan) - Baronary of Nazareth (located in Israel) - Baronary of Kolosis Castle (located in Cypress)

These titles were reconsidered in 2004 by the D' Nigel family and its heirs this family being a line which can name its descendents over 6000 years, all the way back to the biblical "Adam". Being a King line descent from Norway a decision was made to regenerate royal power based on the might of this family history ambition and fitness to satisty the will of God and in path which opens to such desire.

The following changes to title were made and Dukedom and Baronary's extended realising the hate for confinement and Principalities established based on the need for sovergein rule of the bearing capita and for the grand illumination of the heirs in the countries where they lie. Accordingly the right of the title was reconsidered and declared on oath before God as witness to satisfy the desire of the D' Nigel family healthy survival.

Accordingly the "Witness of the Right" to the intention of the principality is detail in words as a "Declaration" as follows:

Principality of Oultrejordain

=
================ I Vernon John D' Nigel on this day do solemly swear on oath before the Court of this Land to with respect to its power, confirm to God that it is my sincere intention to do what is right by principal in obtain heirs true to my name. That heirs should become by a process of survival whereupon it is my will that they shall in your Glory and Wisdom and be accepted by the Almighty powers that are in good faith for their endeavour.

Family Genealogy Web Resoucres

http://www.ststp.com/Archives/Scandinavian/Mythology/Pedigree/ http://baggetthistory.com/history1c.html http://84.1911encyclopedia.org/S/ST/STAFFORD_FAMILY_.htm http://www.ststp.com/Archives/Scandinavian/Mythology/Pedigree/

title: User:Vernon John De Nigel