Artillery: No More Math Headaches
November 15, 2016: European and Israeli firms have increasingly provided American defense manufacturers with effective competition. A recent example of this is LINAPS (Laser Inertial Artillery Pointing System), a computerized fire control system for towed artillery developed and sold by a British firm. LINAPS was actually the first such system for towed artillery and became available in 2001. Although LINAPS adds up to five percent to the cost of a towed gun it was soon found to be well worth the cost because of time saved and increased accuracy.
Computerized fire control systems have been around since the 1970s and until the 1990s were mainly used for direct fire (tank guns) weapons. Meanwhile towed artillery was getting by with programmable calculators and then portable computers to handle a lot of the math required to use towed guns effectively. Starting in the 1990s these computerized systems were developed for indirect fire artillery as well, mainly because the availability of GPS (satellite navigation systems) and laser range finders and target locators by forward observers (who identify targets and pass on the fire requests to the artillery). Systems like LINAPS use both GPS and inertial guidance (if GPS is jammed) systems to determine where the gun is and, once given the coordinates of the distant target, immediately calculate where to point the gun for the most accurate shot. For indirect fire weapons this labor intensive process has been gradually computerized since the 1970s but systems like LINAPS do it all and do it very quickly, effectively and reliably.
https://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htart/articles/20161115.aspx
