"I've mentioned (I'm sure) the story of pulling onto a mortar firing point for the weapons company of 4-31 Inf. (that regiment was waxed on the Chosun east shore, btw). Heavy rain and a 4.2" dud partially buried nose down in the mud some 70 meters in front of the gun pits. No overhead cover for their ammo, dud marked off with some muddy engineer tape, and the boys playing football in the mud IN FRONT OF THE MORTAR POS between the dud. Amazing!" Your safety regulations seem to be rather strict and when reading the stuff here it just makes me wonder how there are so few deaths in Finnish military. In 1998 we were driving in darkness, there was something like 20 cm of snow and we drove to the position where we had to set up regimental HQ for artillery. When the dawn came we recognized that the truck I and few other guys had been driving in, had driven over a dud [120 mm mortar], but the dud was between the wheels.. then our guys discovered another almost in one of our tents. The HQ was set up there anyway and we worked for some time in an area where there were way too many duds [I remember those two because they scared me, but there were several others in that area, all 120mm mortars I think]. After this we had really serious incident that ended one or two careers; our guys from another platoon were sent to reinforce attacking infantry and to provide communications for them and forward observers. Our guys got the call late or got lost, or whatever, but it was their lucky failure. The mortars attacked the "enemy position" some 500 m away from the trenches and there was another attack going on on the other side of the hill - reinforced enemy positions were shelled with 152m guns and somehow, one gun scored 2,6 km failure and direct hit to the trenches where our guys already had some communication stuff... No one died because those who were supposed to be there were late [one of them my friend] and forward observers and the guys with them who had brought the equipment were almost scared to death because the shell exploded just 50m away - good for them that it exploded in the trench. This lead to criminal investigation, prosecution and ended one career and two or three people got some sort of punishment. Never to mention an overdose of media attention. Got a couple of other stories too, but wont bore you with them now.. duties calling.

IIRC FADAC began development in the late fifties, but my instructors never saw it until 'Nam. We always ran a manual check chart. Initial firing data for HE/PD was faster manually. Usually got beat by the FADAC operator on subsequent data. +/- 2mils, same as our lay and safety circles. Always computed met data messages both manually and over FADAC as a check. It actually got to be fun.

I eventually found the safety thing could be used to better organize & evelauate training. Specificly where the regs required a section chief or officer to take a safety certification exam I required all the men in his section to study for and take the exam. This reinforced the regular training more effective than I'd thought & was worth the extra time.

I assume that FADAC didn't fully recompute corrections, just calculated a new deflection and range and converted the latter to a QE based on the previous one. This was the norm for these first gen computers and certainly made for very fast corrections, full calcs probably took 1/3 + or - of the ToF, perhaps more if FADAC was as old as suggested - integrated circuits weren't invented until 1959! Can't say as I took much notice at the time because field computers were still novel and few people knew what to look for!

All I can clearly recal about FADAC was that is used nixie bulbs on the display. LED was not available in 1959 either. It could punch a paper tape & read it. And it weighed about 200 lbs. The battalion FDC used it to solve Met messages, and check the battery manual solutions. Unfortunatly the Met section was badly led and all its product was suspect, so we usually excluded the Met corrections set to us.