Flakking Before '43?

[Frosty1]

Alrighty, here's the scenario:

I'm sitting in my Naval Science II class (NJROTC) and I started flipping through my book. I found a section about naval guns and their ammunition and read the section about flak. The book said that flak was basically a shell that had a proximity fuze in it that uses a small radio to find a target then detonate. That I already knew, but the book said that it wasn't developed until 1943. How can that be? Was there another method before 1943 using timed fuzes maybe?

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===>Frosty
====>Exposure2k.com
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[Jimdandy]

Hmmm I didn't know that. I wonder if before that it was strictly a timed fuse. You know the time it takes for the shell to travel a given distance so you set a timer. It would be much less accurate I would guess. It would also be very slow. But what you could do was just lay down a curtain at the elevation that the plane was expected to come in at and let the plane drive into it.

[Frosty1]

Thats what I was thinking, but it seems so primitive.

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===>Frosty
====>Exposure2k.com
=====>Frosty@exposure2k.com

[Fishu]

I think I heard somewhere that german flak guns used timing fuses which were set before the use..
not sure of this

[Torgo]

The radar fuzes were a late war US thing.

Everything previous was simply a preset altitude.