Monday, August 25, 2014

Scoring Camera


This is a Traid Scoring camera.  It has a 3mm fisheye lens and films to 16mm.  The main film mover is a B&H 70 core 100' movement, driven by a 28v DC motor.

The other feature is that it has a badge saying it is supplied to the USAF by Land Sea.  This company was small when this was built, and it was a contractor the the USAF and not affiliated with the Traid company.  It supplied logistics to the military of the nature of air logistics, test aircraft support, and other things that were out of band for normal channels.

I figure from what I've read they would be the ones in first to set some oddball operation up, and then the AF would come in and document it and staff it with personnel from normal billets if it had to continue operation.

Not sure about the internal ring of 10 neon lamps either.  I suspect they are to do with whatever a scoring camera is.  I didn't find anything to do something like recording timing or other information on the film as the test runs, so not sure why you'd want so much illumination internal to the lens assembly.

Also I had to know how the hell a 3mm focal length lens could be the size of a tallboy beer can.  Usually they have some sort of fisheye assembly on the front, but they tend to shrink with the focal length.  I have 5mm lenses for 16mm film format which are 4" long, but they have curved coverage of the film.