Boy oh boy, you really had us going, Double D. In between sessions at the drafting board, I would ask Mike, "What the heck are we missing here? He even began some obtuse theories about how spacecraft fly and such. I went over everything about that fairly simple sight base in my mind at least a hundred times. Mike even offered this,"Maybe he's a former Air Force pilot with some astronaut training, which means he knows twenty-five times as much about "yaw" as we will ever know?" Well, we sure are glad that you entered your last post.
Your V-Block analogy is right on the money! And also, the fact that the concentricity of the bore to the outside diameters is less than .005", means that you can accurately assume that yaw would be zeroed and adequately controlled as long as your sight axis is coincident with what mortar-men in the 1860s called the "plane of fire" which was a vertical plane 90 deg. from the trunnion axis which bisected the mortar's mass of metal and encompassed the bore axis, the sight axis and the trajectory of the projectile. The honesty of your post is very, very refreshing and does you great credit! Thank you.
Lance, we do expect to see you and Tim, both, in Montana in 2009. We also expect you to show up with the fanciest darn sight base ever built AND a beautiful 1/7th scale Monitor Turret target with ALL the rivets and bolt heads and even that cable they had wrapped around the top edge. Two perfectly scaled 11-inch Dahlgren muzzles within the darkened cannon ports would be icing on the cake!! We can hardly wait to see it!!!
Regards,
Mike and Tracy