Another Stewart Brand fan. I had a WELL account. I used to go to the Hacker's Conference. No, computer technology did not come out of the hippie movement. It came out of the people who wore white shirts in the 1960s.
The Sidewinder story is interesting. I used to work for Ford Aerospace, which made the things at another location. The China Lake crowd developed proximity fuzes, designed to turn a near miss into a hit by detonating the warhead close to the target on a near miss. If they could do some steering correction, they could turn even more near misses into hits. The pilot using an early Sidewinder still has to get on the tail of the target, but they don't have to get as close. Sidewinders usually either get a direct hit or a complete miss, because the heat-seeker gets more accurate as it gets closer.
The competing radar-guided missiles of the era were trying to lock on at much longer ranges and hit the target on their own, like surface-to-air missiles. That's a much harder problem, and the electronics of the era wasn't up to the job.
The "China Lake culture" was simply that there wasn't anything else to do out there but work (it's in the middle of the Mojave Desert), visits from the top brass were rare, and they had all the facilities to build and test weapons without having to outsource fabrication. Plus they had planes, pilots, an airfield, and a bombing range. So a lot of work got done. China Lake was also a joint Navy-university setup with Caltech. (JPL, as a Caltech/NASA operation, is similar.) So they had access to theoreticians when necessary.
The Sidewinder story is interesting. I used to work for Ford Aerospace, which made the things at another location. The China Lake crowd developed proximity fuzes, designed to turn a near miss into a hit by detonating the warhead close to the target on a near miss. If they could do some steering correction, they could turn even more near misses into hits. The pilot using an early Sidewinder still has to get on the tail of the target, but they don't have to get as close. Sidewinders usually either get a direct hit or a complete miss, because the heat-seeker gets more accurate as it gets closer.
The competing radar-guided missiles of the era were trying to lock on at much longer ranges and hit the target on their own, like surface-to-air missiles. That's a much harder problem, and the electronics of the era wasn't up to the job.
The "China Lake culture" was simply that there wasn't anything else to do out there but work (it's in the middle of the Mojave Desert), visits from the top brass were rare, and they had all the facilities to build and test weapons without having to outsource fabrication. Plus they had planes, pilots, an airfield, and a bombing range. So a lot of work got done. China Lake was also a joint Navy-university setup with Caltech. (JPL, as a Caltech/NASA operation, is similar.) So they had access to theoreticians when necessary.