Saintaw
Good question.
The use of stadiametric ranging requires two things...the aiming reticle must be the correct size as seen by the pilot, and the reticle must be sized to a specific sized target. Old style sights had an adjustment where the pilot could set the desired wingspan. This then would allow the gunsight computer to vary the size of the reticle.
In the old 'ring and bead' sights, the alignment of the pipper in the ring relative to the bead was the main objective. When the pilot adjusted his head such that he could match up the pipper and bead, he knew he was looking along the gunline. The gun(s) were then harmonized to fire through this reference at a given distance. This was, of course, a one G setting, and its use in the air required a lot of 'Kentucky windage'. I don't think the relative size of the ring was used for much insofar as ranging is concerned.
The AH sight (the one I use is the crosshairs) could be used for accurate ranging. This sight looks very much like the sight I used in the A-10. Of course, in the Hog, the sight size was an exact size in mils...as a result, it could be easily used to judge range on anything from tanks to aircraft. All we needed to know was the actual size of the tank or aircraft in feet.
But, to do so in AH, we would need to know the gunsight mil size. Let's say the crosshairs is 30 mils wide. Then, the width of the crosshairs would span 30 feet at a range of 1000 feet. If you had a target with a wingspan of 30 feet, the crosshairs would equal the wingspan at 1000 feet, and at 300 feet would span about 1/3 of the wingspan.
From what I've seen so far, the actual appearance of the targets in AH appear to be considerably smaller than they would actually look like in real life. I've learned to disregard my 'eyeball' and trust the icon range.
One additional problem is the ability to 'zoom' the forward view in and out. For the sight to be a reliable indices for stadiametric ranging, the sight size would have to be a constant size relative to our monitor...and not to the cockpit.
Andy
