A bombsight is a device used by military aircraft to drop bombs accurately. Bombsights, a feature of combat aircraft since World War I, were first found on purpose-designed bomber aircraft and then moved to fighter-bombers and modern tactical aircraft as those aircraft took up the brunt of the bombing role.
A bombsight has to estimate the path the bomb will take after release from the aircraft. The two primary forces during its fall are gravity and air drag, which make the path of the bomb through the air roughly parabolic. There are additional factors such as changes in air density and wind that may be considered, but they are concerns only for bombs that spend a significant portion of a minute falling through the air. Those effects can be minimized by reducing the fall time by low-level bombing or by increasing the speed of the bombs. Those effects are combined in the dive bomber.
However, low-level bombing also increases the danger to the bomber from ground-based defences, so accurate bombing from higher altitudes has always been desired. That has led to a series of increasingly sophisticated bombsight designs dedicated to high-altitude level bombing.
Bombsights were first used before World War I and have since gone through several major revisions. The earliest systems were iron sights, which were pre-set to an estimated fall angle. In some cases, they consisted of nothing more than a series of nails hammered into a convenient spar, lines drawn on the aircraft, or visual alignments of certain parts of the structure. They were replaced by the earliest custom-designed systems, normally iron sights that could be set based on the aircraft's airspeed and altitude. These early systems were replaced by the vector bombsights, which added the ability to measure and adjust for winds. Vector bombsights were useful for altitudes up to about 3,000 m and speeds up to about 300 km/h.
In the 1930s, mechanical computers with the performance needed to "solve" the equations of motion started to be incorporated into the new tachometric bombsights, the most famous of which is the Norden.
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Le viseur Norden est un viseur de bombardement monté sur les bombardiers américains pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, la guerre de Corée et la guerre du Viêt Nam. Sa précision supérieure à celle des autres équipements existants à l'époque lui conférait une portée stratégique et en faisait un secret militaire. Le viseur Norden a été conçu par , un ingénieur hollandais ayant fait ses études en Suisse, puis émigré aux États-Unis en 1904. Il travailla sur les viseurs de la Sperry Corporation avant de créer sa propre société.
Le oboe était un système de localisation des objectifs destiné au bombardement aérien sans visibilité et utilisé par les Britanniques au cours de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Il était fondé sur la technologie des transpondeurs radio. Ce système a été employé la première fois en à peu près à l'époque où le radar H2S fit son apparition. Le oboe nécessite deux stations au sol distinctes, situées en Angleterre et suffisamment distantes l'une de l'autre, pour émettre un signal à un bombardier orienteur-marqueur Mosquito équipé d'un transpondeur.
A strategic bomber is a medium- to long-range penetration bomber aircraft designed to drop large amounts of air-to-ground weaponry onto a distant target for the purposes of debilitating the enemy's capacity to wage war. Unlike tactical bombers, penetrators, fighter-bombers, and attack aircraft, which are used in air interdiction operations to attack enemy combatants and military equipment, strategic bombers are designed to fly into enemy territory to destroy strategic targets (e.g.