I used to work at a place that made gyros , part of the calibration procedure was to let them run for a week . This was called caging the gyro . You could watch several gyros spinning when I arrived at work the gyros would be flat perfectly . When I left work they all were about180 degrees pointing straight up . The gyros had NOT moved it was the earth that moved . Blew me away when I saw it happen .
Just done a bit of googling, think I can answer my own Q. with a crude solution. Earth rotation compensation - earth rotates 15 deg./hr anti clockwise, therefore if say time of flight 1 hour, simply aim rocket up to 15 deg to left of target (if target is due south). Earth curvature compensation - correct gyro with an air pressure reading altimeter.
I liked this instructional video. My Father while in the Army designed and tested missiles at White Sands base. My sister has all of his written calculations/descriptions/designs. I like watching him putz with a small bicycle tire having welded rods on the center of the spoke array so he can hold onto it when he got the electric grinder/tool sharpener going at around 3400 rpm and placed the tire to it and got the tire spinning so fast he could hardly handle the dynamics of the spinning wheel in his hands. I watched him make his observations as he tried/forced to tilt the wheel in any direction. he was my teacher and inspiration for inventing. For a winter project we built a gyro copter,aluminum frame and a wooden 3 ply rotor/no motor required. springtime came along and he took it out of the barn and with a strong nylon rope attached it to the copter and the other end tied it to a stake in the ground. being 8 years old at the time, I sat in the chair of the copter..the wind started to pick up and the rotor(not knowing of the rotor brake)began to rotate faster and faster. I did not want to jump off it fearing the blade would kill me..so I went airborne and the first to fly it(sort of). I screamed for dad and he ran out of the house. being about 15 ft in the air he could only give me instructions. I got hold of the steering column, he said push forward slowly ..I did and landed perfectly,he jumped on and knew how to brake the rotors speed. Man what a ride,.he smiled at me and said " I really wanted to be the first and only person to fly it,.but now you have that honor" he was not mad,.but all the more determined to test fly it for himself. Obviously my weight was less and why i went airborne. A week later he and a few friends took it to a large prairie. they attached a long tow rope from copter to truck, dad put on a cheap helmet and harnessed himself in the seat and gave the order to go. the truck traveled about a quarter mile and dad released the guide rope..straight up he went,.then down,.then sideways,.then stabilized his flight. airborne for the better of twenty minutes flying around i could see a grin so big on his face looking though my boy scout binoculars. he eyed a long empty stretch of country road and began his decent and made a perfect landing. When it was all over his friends nicknamed him Gyro Jack. and ya know..he never flew anything else before and the only knowledge of flying the copter came from reading over and over the flying instructions and what to expect and how to counter any problems. he was a cool dad, I am proud of him . Sorry I just had to tell a story here. hope you had fun reading it.
Loved how you built a primitive model and attached simple paper pieces. It showed the principle very well. Too often people show the complicated model right away, making it hard to grasp the fundamentals.
I was a Pershing Missile officer in the late 1960s. The Pershing guidance system was basically the same as you explained. Your video brought back a lot of memories. Thank you.
I'm 59 and have exposed myself (sorry about that) to science all my life. I’ve seen most all the gyro videos on RU-vid. This is the first time I've seen a demonstration of the concept of active control using the broom, that I recall. Perhaps it was the way you succinctly made the the mechanics crystal clear. Absolutely nailed it.
This video was extremely well done. Robert has a real flair for explaining and goes into just the right amount of detail to be interesting. It is not easy to communicate this clearly and keep the viewer engaged. Bravo.
Wow, I just stumbled on this amazing video and learned the rocket science in 20 minutes. Knew all the physics of Gyroscope but to put it altogether in such a simple way is just amazing!!!
Worked in Marine navigation and used to rebuild spinning mass Gyrocompass's by full overhaul , cleaning , dynamic balancing the rotor and then reassembly with new parts ,balancing the gyro itself then running it up and while it precessed and stabilized , checked it over 4 hrs of runup , adding weights as required ... then afterwards test runup and check of the Gyrosphere balances by using a swing table , interesting work .
I so wish Mr Dalby, his helpers and RU-vid were around decades ago (for me that's the 1970s ) so that it didn't take years or even decades for some engineering concepts to come together and link up in my head. What a beauty!
excellent explanation and demonstration, I had not seen a proper attempt to explain how exactly the gyroscope information was converted to fin movements before. I love this era of engineering and electronics because there are no computers or advanced electronics to break a chain of understanding from start to finish.
Amazing footage of the V2…. Amazing brain that came up with the gyroscope .. the human brain is truly remarkable.. Von Braun was a genius and deserved a Nobel Prize…😏
A professor of mine told a story about a science teachers' meeting. One participant had prepared a suitcase with gyro inside. Arriving at the conference hotel, he spun up the gyro, signed in and the let the bell boy help him with the suitcase. Coming to the corridor corner, the bell boy was amazed how the suit case did not want to make the 90 degree turn. Well, after this story the professor lifted a box from behind the stand, grabbed a string handle and pulled it heavily. Then he demonstrated with that box how the mentioned suitcase had behaved at the hotel. I believe everybody in the audience enjoyed this kind of teaching as much as I did.
Excellent presentation. And thank you for not flooding the video with rock music, techno music or multiple frame snap- backs or constant close ups of you ( not dismissing you, but many RU-vid presenters are trying to promote their personal image rather than present the information ). Your presentation brilliant for showing it is a gyro in a gimbal with instrumentation on the gimbal providing the guidance data - that is what many explanations skip (or don't know or can't explain). Thank you. I have spent many hours watching your videos on rockets. Now on to your astronomy vids . . .
I personally think that explaining the two properties of a gyro Rigidity & Precession would have made the presentation more understandable in the circumstances. Good effort.
Thanks! I'm a pilot studying for my instrument rating - this really helped me to understand how a gyroscopic attitude indicator functions. Nicely done.
@@vitaliytsupruk2047 The curvature of the earth does not affect the accuracy of the gyro, because wherever the airplane is, it is essentially at the “top” of the world. The attitude (orientation) of the airplane is always relative to it’s exact position. This is why the gyro is even more important at higher altitudes, because the artificial horizon it displays is more accurate than the actual horizon, which is skewed by the curvature of the earth. Altitude is maintained by seeking a constant air pressure, so even as an airplane travels across the globe, it’s attitude orientation remains constant, and the altitude is adjusted by maintaining a height at a constant air pressure.
In the video he makes a gimbal for a toy gyroscope. He uses a cool metal strip from a roll that has regularly spaced hole so he can use screws and bolts to assemble it. He shows gyros from a V2 and from a "Soviet era SA75" surface to air missile. There's some V2 launch footage including one where the rocket engine is making just enough thrust to keep it suspended above the launch site.
... sehr sehr gut - toll dargestellt mit Feuerwerkrakete, Besen und Kinderkreisel mit tollem schnell selbstgebauten Mechanismus für den Spielzeugkreisel... Toll! 👍👏
Great video! I'm about to implement my Arduino gyroscope to a segway I'm building and I felt that I needed to know the principle behind gyroscopes abit more and this video is awesome.. Thanks alot!
Well done. I have struggled to understand this but as the video progressed, I started to get the idea. When you built the gimbal it was all coming together.
Thank you for the wonderful documentary. I tried to understand how gyros stabilise rockets for a long time and finally I understood how it exactly does it.
Fascinating. And a good understandable explanation for dummies like me. my older brother had the same gyroscope toy when we were kids. It still fascinates and puzzles me how a spinning mass can seemingly defy the normal effects of gravity
I noticed this little fault too, it's actually called the 'Pendulum rocket fallacy'. On the pyro rockets it's just the aerodynamic drag effect reducing the instability (not negating it entirely) sending it into a gravity turn trajectory. Maybe it's just the term 'counterbalancing' that is not correct and causing the confusion (and introducing the pendulum fallacy). Nice video though, love seeing the actual original rocket parts.
I have been waiting for such an explanation. Because I have always been interested in space exploration, and have never seen it explained why the rockets do not fall over. Because it is being pushed, not pulled, it normally would fall over. Thanks for the very interesting video!
I read the book from Walter Dornberger (he was the director in Peenemünde) about the engineering struggles of the V2. He told that the giroscopic correction system was to slow in its reactions to mantain the correct orientation of the A4 during liftoff. So they designed an inertial movement detector , aka an accelerometer in two directions , to steer the rocket during liftoff. An accelerometer reacts in the same moment when the orientation change starts , where the giroscopes react when the when the orientation has already changed.
I worked for 23 years at a steel mill. In the 1970's I was helping a guy with a heavy German accent move boxes. He was in charge of the office storeroom. At lunch break, he saw I was reading a science fiction paperback and asked if I would like to read a book about the V2 rocket. Of course I said yes. It was Dornberger's book. It was inscribed by Dornberger to the office supply manager. Apparently they were friends. If I recall, the manager's name was Otto Heinz Kuhn.
I feel magnetism and gyroscopes are as yet untapped potential sources of useful work. We know so little about these two concepts, and there’s so much more we could do with their help.
really great and very high quality informative video, i rarely see videos that don't annoy me in one way or another! Keep up the good work! Greetings and all the best!
Hi, Reduce the friction of the bearings. Improve the rotor by making it heavier and making sure it's very well balanced. But the best/simplest way with a toy gyroscope is to wind the cord carefully onto the spindle so that each turn of cord is neatly on the spindle - and when it's covered, run the rest of the cord neatly back on top of first layer and so on. Basically, avoid allowing the cord to simply wind onto itself. This way the pull will impart maximum RPM for any given pull force. KR RJD
In the 1930s/40s, the gyroscope was a pretty mature technology. The Howell Torpedo (1870) used a flywheel, spun up before launch, as power source and as course correction --- any deviation would cause the torpedo to roll, detected by a pendulum, causing corrective steering commands. The Obry stearing gear (1896, patent sold to Whitehead) was using a gyro and an air-powered servo to actuate the control surfaces (not draining the gyro itself). A pretty successful concept ... still used in German WWII electric torpedoes (which is why they carried some compressed air bottles). The only further pure gyro refinement (opposed to FAT and LUT) I know of in that time frame was having 2 gyros: spin up (via air stream) and switch torpedo control to the other when the current one slows down, and vice versa. Which stopped the gyro slowing down being a range problem. So, yeah, gyros were pretty mature as control devices. The gyro compass actually takes it's name from the gyro it employs. (Basically, it's using the rotation of the planet to find true north, independent from any and all magnetic fields, quite valuable on a submarine, but a host of engineering and design skill is needed to make an effective one ... and planes are too fast compared to the Earth's rotation to be able to use it.)
@BULL SCHEIST Because even at maximum runtime and worst-case (near the poles, straight north or straight south) the inaccuracy is less than the inaccuracy of the torpedo solution. Also the deviation is known and computable, if necessary. German submarine, worst case: long range shot against a freighter in a well defended convoy north of Murmansk, straight north or south at @30 knots: 36 metres, runtime beyond 4 minutes and 20 seconds. Misjudging the enemy's speed by 1 knot: 514 m difference over the same time frame. So even if your enemy speed calculation is exact to 0.1 knots, your error from that is still larger than the worst case of "Earth rotation influences gyroscopes". German surface worst case: 12km @30kn (with the TI, leaving a bubble trail): this would be shot as a multi-ship salvo against a whole battle line of enemy warships, in the hopes that one or two might hit by chance, if the enemy does not maneuver in the next 13 minutes. Worst case (north-south near the poles): 320m. And, see above, computable. At the inaccuracies of targeting and co, this again is not a problem. (In fact it was the submarines that detected the (German) torpedo crisis, the surface naval forces just assumed bad aiming due to long range and bad luck). Japanese Type 93 (oxygen torpedo), worst case: it can cross 40.4km in almost 38 minutes, so the worst case Earth rotation influence is zero, as it uses gyrocompass, so it always knows true north, thanks to the Earth's rotation. Also, the Japanese did most of their fighting much nearer the equator, where the Earth's rotation does not change north/south and east/west changes the pitch of the torpedo --- and even 15° pitch up/down (1 hour) does not cause problems in steering the course. Does that answer your question?
Omg :) I was looking for a good video on gyroscope's functionality and found this gem- Subscribed right away - love this channel - Thank you for creating it 🎉🥇
Landing a returning rocket back to earth using the same principle, was an incredible achievement by SpaceX, It seemed to me at the time was mind blowing,
