What in the name of $Diety was it doing?
In the case of the Gulf War incident, the Patriot battery's computer rounded a similar, non-terminating number in order to calculate time. But by shaving off a few digits during every calculation, the battery also shaved off a bit of time. After one hour, the Patriot's clock was off by .0034 seconds. On Feb 25, the computer had been in operation for 100 hours straight, and its clock was off by over one third of a second, enough to cause it to miss the incoming Scud.
(My emphasis)
What idiot designs a system that pushes its own clock out over time?
My grandad built much better anti-missile systems than that, and his were built over 25 years ago!
It doesn't need to know what time it is anyway - all an anti-missile battery needs to know is where an incoming missible is relative to the battery, how fast it's going and what direction.
Make a guess as to where it's aimed at, then do some EVENT calculations. Don't bother remembering how long since the last one - you don't care! |
