The Falkands Connection
This might be a legend. Sounds believable, as a Real Life "multiple tabs open" bug.
It appears that the British had developed some fancy hardware/software that was the top of the top at the time (the kind any of us could perhaps replicate today with a few R-Pi, some Python and a software radio) to pick up ionization trails and do some trigonometry.
If you know anything about mortars in the field, you need about three rounds before you can do real damage. First shot gives you a rough idea, second you adjust the screws in your mortar but likely either too much or not quite, in those days (no idea now) that was a manual operation with some rough settings to guide you and printed calculation tables. By the third one, if you are really good, you will be almost on target, and from there on the poor sods on the other side are out of luck, you're dropping ugly welcome packages right on top of them. Of course you need to have an observer doing good telemetry from the explosions, and you have to really know what you're doing. A more standard crew that is not so good (think kids right out of an Argentinian Secundaria, freezing and famished, maybe 7 shots before they can get anything, if very lucky.)
Well, works pretty much the same from the other side, IFF you can pinpoint where the rounds are originating from. Tricky at best by eyesight. But not that bad if you can get data from the ionization trail, "simple enough" with a radio receiver array. Even if this is 1980s tech, let me not go into detail, who knows how "secret" this kind of things are supposed to be. Whatever, the legend says that the landing British could pinpoint exactly where a mortar was shooting from, after three rounds, and tell their colleagues manning the naval guns, to kindly deliver some of their own into the offending mortar.
Once the Argentinians noticed they were blown off with European precision after their third shot, they really were in a bind. See? to do telemetry when you're shooting, you have to space out the timing of shooting, from your outfit, or else you have no idea if the explosion on the other end was yours, or your mate's shooting from 50 meters away. But, if you had to decamp and set up somewhere else after firing just two rounds, or else, your chance at hitting anything in the other side was nearly nil.
Who knows what happened, perhaps those freezing and hungry kids got frustrated and just starting shooting with no order. Then they realized the British were no longer able to find them...
This didn't help the Argentinians much in terms of hitting anything, because their disorderly shooting didn't give them back good telemetry opportunities. Perhaps at some moment there was one of them bright enough to realize that what gave the British precision came from the mortar trails.
The legend says that from then on, the Argentinians were using bottle rockets, shot from random, different points than the mortar that was testing its parameters. Creating that way fake ionization trails. Bottle rockets might have been too much to expect, though it brings in a low-tech, David vs. Goliath kind of image, but would expect too much from other officers to accept the word of someone in the field, and then have those sent from terra firma or even Stanley. If there were some bright ones at the front, I wouldn't expect any but idiots all the way to Stanley, Buenos Aires and back, it is widely known their supply lines were borked from day one and just got worse later. I would think what was used was just plain standard Mil flares. More prosaic than romantic cheap bottle rockets, but equally effective in confusing ionization trail telemetry.
Yup. That was like "too many tabs open" sending data, that then gets confused in the back end. Blame Ed and his back end, will you? Possibly/probably the software/hardware was developed under ideal lab conditions, go figure, where testing was nice and ordered, not assuming the enemy would misbehave...
If any of you are connected to Falklands or whatever gunnery or other groups that might care about the story, feel free to pass it along. It would be interesting to find confirmation, and also that the story doesn't get lost - this is the kind of "interesting" tidbit that would not make it into standard military history books. Got it through oral transmission, following up after a story regarding on how it was possible to watch Moscow TV from Prague in the late 1950s when reflecting the signal from meteor ionization trails (?!?!) According to that tale, the kid that was doing it got in trouble. But, as we say, that's another story...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
