Re: Books on Ballistics
I would recommend the following:
1) McCoy is the master of all books. There is a reason why all other books that were written after that cite his book. The book was written after he passed and compiled by his peers which speak to his life as a person and ballistician. There are a lot of errors so look up the errata and spend an hour getting them input into the book.
2) Litz takes the engineering out of McCoy and is useful for getting your bearings (even as an engineer). He also has some spin drift equations and data collection in of themselves worth the value of the book. He generally peruses the forum and I think an aeronautical engineer like yourself.
3) Ballistics by Carlucci is like McCoy but IMO is superfluous on external ballistics to McCoy. However, he has equations on all 4 parts of ballistics and I purchased in the event I study the other 3 areas. He works at Picatinny Arsenal. I talked to one of his friends whom I am taking classes with and he uses it a lot in ballistics.
4) If you are pursuing Aeronautics, you may want to do a study on approximate methods for predicting aerodynamic coefficients. CFD, or "colorful" fluid dynamics, has some significant limitations, and experimentation is expensive. So your next best thing is to use empirical data interpolation. I would look for AP09 or missile DATCOM software that your school hopefully has available? I am taking classes at a military school, so they maybe a little harder otherwise to come by. Frank G. Moore's book on Approximate Methods for Weapon Aerodynamics could be quite helpful. I have yet to purchase the book, but took a course from Max Platzer that was a derivative of that book. Platzer got to work with Von Braun on the Saturn 5, and had a lot of good history stories. I will be purchasing the book soon when I have the time and money to read it. Of note: you start looking at bullets and missile in the same light.
6) Take a class, or do some reading on numerical analysis. Also get very familiar with MATLAB. No real book to encourage here. I use to avoid matlab like the plague in my undergrad, but it is extremely helpful to solve time-step problems.
I have pursued quite a bit of books on the topic, and they should get you started. If you want 1 book, it starts and ends with McCoy. The book is also a very reasonable price. I WOULD NOT buy Art Pejsa's book. The quality of the formatting, the dimensional analysis problems of the equations, and the method are just a waste of money. He was a physicist and a math teacher from my former alumni; I would expect a better product. To his defense, I was so mad by the formatting, I gave up by page 3. I may try to finish the book when I retire in 40 years.
Let me know if you have any questions.
