May 152015
 

Saw this on eBay:

German WWII electro-mechanical analog computer for the V2 rocket – A4 missile

The starting bid price is a bit rich for my blood…  $7500. But if the photos and the scan from the Christies catalog are accurate, it does seem to be vintage V-2 hardware. Not quite sure what it did or where it did it; since there are dials that a human was apparently meant to set, it would seem to be part of the aiming system (which was little more than “go that far then flop out of the sky,” with azimuth controlled by rotating the launch pad and, IIRC, some radio guidance to get it pointed in the right direction. It *might* have gone on the missile itself, or it *might* have been part of the launch infrastructure. Shrug. This unit seems to be missing some bits, such as the rather important dials.

A bunch of photos at the auction site.

V2computer1 (21) V2computer1 (10) V2computer1 (4) V2computer1 (3) V2computer1 (2) V2computer1 (1)

 Posted by at 6:53 pm