HMS Sheffield

Yesterday marked the adversary of the sinking of HMS Sheffield by an Exocet rocket during the Falklands War. Rockets have been around as long as gun powder, but until the twentieth century they had never been that good. The chinese were the first to use rocket artillary, with their use spreading from China, through the Indian states and the Middle East. The British brought the idea back from india and used them during the Napoleonic Wars, with both Army and Naval Rocket artillary being used. However the cannon remained the principal form of artillary, simply because the inventions that rockets needed to transform them into a really effective weapon hadn't been created yet.

There were two main problems with rockets: they were not very efficient at turning the energy of the gunpowder fuel into movement, they were not at all accurate. Of course cannon was not accurate either during the napoleonic period, but the way that they were used meant that this did not matter. On land you just pointed it at one of the densly packed columns of men coming towards you and waited until you could expect to hit somebody. At sea broadsides needed to conducted at fairly close range in order to be able to punch through the thick hulls of their opponents. The main advantage of a rocket over a cannon is that the range is potentially greater, but all that does it means that it will miss by a greater amount.

These problems were solved during the twentieth century. The efficiency problem was solved by Goddard when he attached an exhaust nozel to his rocket that was tuned to the hypersonic speeds of the exhaust gasses. The accuracy problem was solved by the creation of guidence systems: starting with the primative ones developed by the Germans during World War 2, and then improved upon by everybody else subsequently.

The sinking of the HMS Sheffield vividly showed how dangerous guided missiles had become to surface ships; much like Toranto had demonstrated that the era of the Battleship was over though the technology that had made this so had already been in place for decades.