ellauri066.html on line 364: Even without substituting the remaining parameters d and c1, it is clear that Pynchon’s Second Equation resembles – and in fact is – the equation of moments that the Peenemünde physicists and engineers used to calculate and control the angular motion (yaw) of the V-2 rocket.
ellauri066.html on line 366: To shorten a long story of searching for sources: the essay ‘The Control System of the V-2’ by Otto Müller includes an ‘equation for control in yaw’ (Müller, 1957: 90), and in exactly the same notation as Gravity’s Rainbow’s equation ‘describ[ing] motion under the aspect of yaw control’ (GR 284). We can conclude that this is the searched-for template for Pynchon’s Second Equation (see appendix, Figure 8). Müller’s paper is part of History of German Guided Missiles Development by Theodor Benecke and August W. Quick, published in 1957, which is based on the First Guided Missiles Seminar in Munich that took place a year earlier. The seminar was organised by the American Advisory Group for Aeronautical Research and Development (AGARD) to collect information about the V-2 from German scientists and engineers to use in American research on guided missiles. Pynchon might have had access to this book and further material on rocketry in the Boeing Company for which he worked as a technical writer in the early 1960s.
ellauri066.html on line 368: Moore’s intuition that Pynchon’s Second Equation is real proved to be correct, and he and his colleague correctly assign the angle ϕ to the orientational range of the rocket. But since they did not know that this formula is only one in a set of equations that describe the flight path, the orientation, and the steering of the V-2, the research team was misled in their interpretation of the other parameters and terms. With Müller’s paper, we can finally determine the meaning of each term and compare these with Pynchon’s reading. The first three terms refer, respectively, to the moments of inertia, of air resistance, and of lateral air impact when the rocket yaws, and the term on the right side of the equal sign represents the steering moment of the rudders (Müller, 1957: 90, 91; Kirschstein, 1951: 73, 74). In other words, the left-hand terms describe the orientation of the rocket during flight, which is influenced by external forces such as wind currents and air resistance.
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