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{SPEAKER name="Michael Neufeld"}
Okay, this is interview with Dr. Walter Haeussermann, January 24th, 1990, take 2, side 1. Okay, you were saying about, uh, the development of the mathematical equations of stability, a description of stability.
[00:00:24]
{SPEAKER name="Walter Haeussermann"}
Well, at that time, we had no criteria yet to judge when a system is sufficiently stable or to give limits for desired stability.
[00:00:39]
We had, to our knowledge, purely academically derived conditions to say when a system is stable, and when is not stable.
[00:00:53]
But we had not included in these mathematical considerations any non-linearities, which are connected, to us, any practical system.
[00:01:05]
Practical systems just don't behave lineally, as you usually use in your high tech, use in your mathematics.
[00:01:13]
So we had to start from scratch to see what can be done to evaluate a system for its stability.
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And theoretically investigations are made, where we come up with some mathematic calculations that are carried out, especially considering that at time we had very primitive calculators.
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And so our last resort was just to go into analog computation and to simulate as closely as possible with analog computers.
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Still, to be supported mathematically to find out what the performance of the analog computers is.
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Mathematics give you ideal situations, which you don't find in linearity. So our simulation equipment, of course, should.
[00:02:18]
Likely [[?]] flying, behave almost ideally.
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But could those conditions, which has the known linearities, had to be tied in, into the mathematics of the flight motions, and this had to be resolved in a fashion in the level, though,
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so that you could repeat, on a one-to-one time scale, your flight performance and evaluate it and determine what are the limits of your adjustments and gain factors, in order to achieve the desired flight results.

[00:02:57]
{SPEAKER name="Michael Neufeld"}
So you would consider that to be one of the most important problems--

{SPEAKER name="Walter Haeussermann"}
This was--

{SPEAKER name="Michael Neufeld"}
Solved at Peenemünde?

[00:03:07]
{SPEAKER name="Walter Haeussermann"}
This was one of the problems we had to attack, and in my opinion, we solved them satisfactorily for the environments of the A4.

[00:03:17]
{SPEAKER name="Michael Neufeld"}
Mm-hmm. And that would have been an accomplishment unique in the world.

{SPEAKER name="Walter Haeussermann"}
I think so, yes.

[00:03:24]
{SPEAKER name="Michael Neufeld"}
In terms of stability calculations, which are demanding.

{SPEAKER name="Walter Haeussermann"}
Yes.

[00:03:29]
{SPEAKER name="Michael Neufeld"}
In such a demanding situation. Uh, I mean, what other things in Peenemünde's technological development did you consider to be really sort of groundbreaking, or in guidance and control?

[00:03:49]
{SPEAKER name="Walter Haeussermann"}
I think you know that we worked with various methods to determine that acceleration of a missile. We had accelerometers which had to be efficiently output, had to be indicated, for instance, for thrust cutoff on the A4.
[00:04:15]
And these problems we had solved, for this indication, was solved with a chemical cell. Also developed in Darmstadt by Professor Wagner, close in connection with Professor Buchhold. And there are many developments like this