With the 50th Anniversary of Victory in World War II comes PROTECT & AVENGE: The 49th Fighter Group in World War II.\nAfter six years of research, author and illustrator S.W. Ferguson, Along with 49ERS Association historian William K. Pascalis, have recreated the war-years odyssey of the famous 49ERS, the most successful fighter group in the war against Japan. Flyers Paul Wrutsmith, Bob Morrissey, Ernie Harris, Gerry Johnson, Bob DeHaven and leading American ace Dick Bong, are but a few of the men who contribute to the 49ERS legend. \nFrom their desert air strips of Northwest Territory, Australia, through their jungle camps of New Guinea and the Philippines, to the final moment of victory on the Japanese homeland, all are detailed in this new volume. Derived from the diaries and logs of 49ERS veterans, the groups official USAF history and the U.S. National Archives, the story chronicles more than thirty aces and their crews who achieved over 600 aerial kills in three years of continuous combat.\nThe text is highlighted by more than 600 black and white photos, six compaign maps, and twenty-four color profiles of select P-40s, P-57s, and P-38s.\nS.W. Ferguson lives in Colorado Springs where he has pursued his teaching, writing and art career for the last ten years. His interests are American writers and history of the 20th century, and swift waters that yield trout. \nBill Pascalis is a veteran aircraft mechanic of the 49ERS Selfridge AFB cadre and served through the New Guinea campaign of mid-1943. After the war, he established a long career with Tranworld Airlines. He now lives with his wife in retirement in Florida, enjoying golf, his grandchildren and research in the 5th Air Force archives.

Fiducials in the form of intersecting straight lines are used to align the target in the final target chamber of the National Ignition Facility of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. One of the techniques used to locate these lines is the Hough transform. When two lines intersect at a 90 degree angle, it is tempting to orient the lines to horizontal and vertical directions. There are other possible angles at which the lines may be oriented. One question that arises while designing the fiducials is whether there is a preferred angle or range of angles that leads to higher accuracy. This work attempts to answer this question through detailed computer simulation.

One of the major purposes of National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is to accurately focus 192 high energy laser beams on a nanoscale (mm) fusion target at the precise location and time. The automatic alignment system developed for NIF is used to align the beams in order to achieve the required focusing effect. However, if a distorted image is inadvertently created by a faulty camera shutter or some other opto-mechanical malfunction, the resulting image termed ''off-normal'' must be detected and rejected before further alignment processing occurs. Thus the off-normal processor acts as a preprocessor to automatic alignment image processing. In this work, we discuss the development of an ''off-normal'' pre-processor capable of rapidly detecting the off-normal images and performing the rejection. Wide variety of off-normal images for each loop is used to develop the criterion for rejections accurately.

An algorithm for determining the position of the KDP back-reflection image was developed. It was compared to a centroid-based algorithm. While the algorithm based on centroiding exhibited a radial standard deviation of 9 pixels, the newly proposed algorithm based on classical matched filtering (CMF) and a Gaussian fit to correlation peak provided a radial standard deviation of less than 1 pixel. The speed of the peak detection was improved from an average of 5.5 seconds for Gaussian fit to 0.022 seconds by using a polynomial fit. The performance was enhanced even further by utilizing a composite amplitude modulated phase only filter; producing a radial standard deviation of 0.27 pixels. The proposed technique was evaluated on 900+ images with varying degrees of noise and image amplitude as well as real National Ignition Facility (NIF) images.

The alignment of high energy laser beams for potential fusion experiments demand high precision and accuracy by the underlying positioning algorithms. This paper discusses the feasibility of employing online optimal position estimators in the form of model-based processors to achieve the desired results. Here we discuss the modeling, development, implementation and processing of model-based processors applied to both simulated and actual beam line data.

The objectives of this study were to verify the accuracy of the hybrid computer version of the Rotorcraft Simulation Program C81 as a flapping predictor, to investigate the effect of operational envelope limits on flapping, and to investigate methods of extending the recommended operational envelopes of the subject helicopter.