The A1 also known as the Great North Road is the longest  numbered road in the United Kingdom, at . It connects London, the capital of England, with Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. It passes through or near  north London, Hatfield, Welwyn Garden City, Stevenage, Baldock, Letchworth Garden City, Biggleswade, Eaton Socon, Buckden, Peterborough, Stamford, Grantham, Newark-on-Trent, Retford, Doncaster, Pontefract, York, Wetherby, Ripon, Darlington, Durham, Sunderland, Gateshead, Newcastle upon Tyne, Morpeth, Alnwick and Berwick-upon-Tweed.

It was designated by the Ministry of Transport in 1921, and for much of its route it followed various branches of the historic Great North Road, the main deviation being between Boroughbridge and Darlington. The course of the A1 has changed where towns or villages have been bypassed, and where new alignments have taken a slightly different route. Several sections of the route have been upgraded to motorway standard and designated A1(M). Between the M25 (near London) and the A720 (near Edinburgh) the road is part of the unsigned Euroroute E15 from Inverness to Algeciras.

History

The A1 is the latest in a series of routes north from London to York and beyond. It was designated in 1921 by the Ministry of Transport under the Great Britain road numbering scheme. The earliest documented northern routes are the roads created by the Romans during the period from AD 43 to AD 410, which consisted of several itinera (plural of iter) recorded in the Antonine Itinerary. A combination of these were used by the Anglo-Saxons as the route from London to York, and together became known as Ermine Street. Ermine Street later became known as the Old North Road. Part of this route in London is followed by the current A10. By the 12th century, because of flooding and damage by traffic, an alternative route out of London was found through Muswell Hill, and became part of the Great North Road. A turnpike road, New North Road and Canonbury Road (A1200 road), was constructed in 1812 linking the start of the Old North Road around Shoreditch with the Great North Road at Highbury Corner. While the route of the A1 outside London mainly follows the Great North Road route used by mail coaches between London and Edinburgh, within London the coaching route is only followed through Islington.

Bypasses were built around Barnet and Hatfield in 1927, but it was not until  that they were renumbered A1. In the 1930s bypasses were added around Chester-le-Street and Durham and the Ferryhill Cut was dug. In the late 1950's the village of Southoe then in Huntingdonshire, saw one of the first stretches of the A1 to be dualled, this because of the amount of serious accidents near the Bell public house which stands just a few metres from the road edge. In 1960 Stamford, Biggleswade and Doncaster were bypassed, as were Retford in 1961. Baldock, Eaton Socon and Buckden  were bypassed in 1967. During the early 1970s plans to widen the A1 along Archway Road in London were abandoned after considerable opposition and four public inquiries during which road protesters disrupted proceedings. The scheme was finally dropped in 1990. The Hatfield cut-and-cover was opened in 1986.

A proposal to upgrade the whole of the A1 to motorway status was investigated by the government in 1989 but was dropped in 1995, along with many other schemes, in response to road protests against other road schemes (including the Newbury Bypass and the M3 extension through Twyford Down).

Inns

The inns on the road, many of which still survive, were staging posts on the coach routes, providing accommodation, stabling for the horses and replacement mounts. Few of the surviving coaching inns can be seen while driving on the A1, because the modern route now bypasses the towns with the inns.

Route

The A1 runs from New Change in the City of London at St. Paul's Cathedral to the centre of Edinburgh. It shares its London terminus with the A40, in the City area of Central London. It runs out of London via St. Martin's Le Grand and Aldersgate Street, through Islington (where Goswell Road and Upper Street form part of its route), up Holloway Road, through Highgate, and Barnet.

The road enters Hertfordshire just before Potters Bar, near the junction with the M25 at the South Mimms Services. The route here becomes the A1(M) and subsequently passes through Hatfield, Welwyn, Stevenage, Baldock. But from Baldock Junction 10 throughBiggleswade, Sandy, several small villages to Buckden then on to Alconbury Junction 14. Junctions 11, 12 and 13 are still to be planned/built. Several groups along this non motorway stretch are actively campaigning for an upgrade to modern standards.

Continuing north, the A1 runs on modern bypasses around Stamford, Grantham, Newark-on-Trent, Retford, Bawtry, Doncaster, Knottingley, Garforth, Wetherby, Knaresborough, Boroughbridge, Scotch Corner, Darlington, Newton Aycliffe, Durham and Chester-le-Street, past the Angel of the North sculpture and the Metrocentre in Gateshead, through the western suburbs of Newcastle upon Tyne, Morpeth, Alnwick, Berwick-upon-Tweed, into Scotland at Marshall Meadows, past Haddington and Musselburgh before arriving in Edinburgh at the East End of Princes Street near Waverley Station, at the junction of the A7, A8 and A900 roads.

Scotch Corner, in North Yorkshire, marks the point where before the M6 was built, the traffic for Glasgow and the west of Scotland diverged from that for Edinburgh. As well as a hotel there have been a variety of sites for the transport café, now subsumed as a motorway services.

A1 Roundabouts, There are currently only 5 roundabouts north of the Sterling corner junction.  Biggleswade south. Biggleswade North, Sandy A603, Blackcat A428/A4211, lastly Buckden, then there are no more roundabouts for 276 miles until the Berwick A1167.  The Blackcat roundabout is due to be removed with the upgrade 2023-2025, this will leave only 4 roundabouts in a 350 mile stretch.

Overview and post-First World War developments

A  section of the road in North Yorkshire, from Walshford to Dishforth, was upgraded to motorway standard in 1995. Neolithic remains and a Roman fort were discovered.

A  section of the road from Alconbury to Peterborough was upgraded to motorway standard at a cost of £128 million (£ as of ), which opened in 1998 requiring moving the memorial to Napoleonic prisoners buried at Norman Cross.

A number of sections between Newcastle and Edinburgh were dualled between 1999 and 2004, including a  section from Spott Wood to Oswald Dean in 1999,  sections from Bowerhouse to Spott Road and from Howburn to Houndwood in 2002–2003 and the  "A1 Expressway", from Haddington and Dunbar in 2004. The total cost of these works was £50 million.

Plans to dual the single carriageway section of road north of Newcastle upon Tyne were shelved in 2006 as they were not considered a regional priority by central government. The intention was to dual the road between Morpeth and Felton and between Adderstone and Belford.

In 1999 a section of A1(M) between Bramham and Hook Moor opened to traffic along with the extension of the M1 from Leeds. Under a DBFO contract, sections from Wetherby to Walshford and Darrington to Hook Moor were opened in 2005 and 2006.

Recent developments

A1 Peterborough to Blyth grade separated junctions
Between September 2006 and October 2009 six roundabouts on the A1 and the A1(M) to Alconbury were replaced with grade-separated junctions. These provide a fully grade-separated route between the Buckden roundabout (just north of St Neots and approximately  north of the Black Cat Roundabout) and just north of Morpeth. This project cost £96 million.

A1(M) Bramham to Wetherby motorway
Upgrading the  of road to dual three-lane motorway standard between the Bramham/A64 junction to north of Wetherby to meet the section of motorway at a cost of £70 million began in 2006, including a road alongside for non-motorway traffic. The scheme's public inquiry began on 18 October 2006 and the project was designed by James Poyner. Work began in May 2007, the motorway section opened in July 2009 and remaining work on side roads was still ongoing in late August and was expected to be completed by the end of 2009.

A1(M) Dishforth to Leeming motorway
Upgrading of the existing dual carriageway to dual three-lane motorway standard, with a local road alongside for non-motorway traffic, between Dishforth (A1(M)/A168 junction) and Leeming Bar, began in March 2009 and opened to traffic on or about the scheduled date of 31 March 2012.

A1(M) Leeming to Barton motorway
It had originally been proposed that the road would be upgraded to motorway from Dishforth to Barton (between Scotch Corner and Darlington), which was the start of current northernmost section of A1(M). In 2010 the section between Leeming and Barton was cancelled as part of government spending cuts but it was reinstated in December 2012. Work began on 3 April 2014 and was expected to be completed by Spring 2017, but only reached completion in March 2018 due in part to significant Roman-era archaeological finds along the route of the motorway.   Completion has provided a continuous motorway-standard road between Darrington (south of M62 junction) and Washington, and given the North East and North Yorkshire full motorway access to London (via the M1 at Darrington and Hook Moor).

Councils in the north east have called for the section from Hook Moor in Yorkshire (where the M1 link road joins the A1(M)) to Washington to be renumbered as the M1. They maintain that this would raise the profile of the north-east and be good for business.

A1 (Gateshead Western Bypass)
In his Autumn Statement on 5 December 2012, the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced that the Government would upgrade a section of road from two to three lanes in each direction within the highway boundary at Lobley Hill (between Coal House and the Metro Centre), Gateshead at a cost of £64 m and create parallel link roads between the Lobley Hill and Gateshead Quay junctions. The same Road investment strategy announcement said that the remaining section of road between Birtley and Coal House will also be widened to three lanes each way, alongside the replacement of the Allerdene Bridge. A modified scheme commenced in August 2014 and was open to traffic in June 2016. The road is now three lanes each way with lane 3 narrower than lanes 1 and 2 so that all existing bridges remained as originally built.

The A1 around Durham, Gateshead and Newcastle has seen a number of incarnations, following routes through, to the east and to the west of both Gateshead and Newcastle.   See A1 (Newcastle upon Tyne) for more information.

Ongoing developments

A1 Grantham Southern Relief Road
The new junction is now complete on the A1 south of Grantham, Highways England constructed 4 new slip roads to connect the A1 Trunk Road to the new Grantham Southern Relief Road being constructed by Lincolnshire County Council. This will create a southern entry to Grantham and also to the site known as the 'King 31 Development'. The King 31 (Phase 1) is the section from the Grade Separated Junction to the B1174 (now completed). Phase three is the Southern Quadrant Link Road (SQLR). The Grantham Transport Strategy 2007-2021 identified the need for an east west relief road to bypass the centre of Grantham (A52) for traffic and open up the town and surrounding area to a significant amount of growth. Project expected to be completed in 2025.

Proposed developments

A1(M) Red House to Darrington motorway
In the "Road investment strategy" announced to Parliament by the Department for Transport and Secretary of State for Transport on 1 December 2014, planning will begin to upgrade the road in South Yorkshire to raise the last non-motorway section from Red House to Darrington to motorway standard. Once completed, it will provide a continuous motorway-standard road between Blyth, Nottinghamshire and Washington, Tyne and Wear and will provide the North East and Yorkshire with full motorway access to London via the M1, M62 and M18. It will also improve safety along this route, as well as creating a new corridor to the North East, and reducing congestion on the M1 around Sheffield and Leeds.  This is the only missing link of motorway on the strategic M1/M18/A1(M) route London to Washington.

A1 Scotswood to North Brunton
The same announcement said that the road from Scotswood to North Brunton would be widened to three lanes each way, with four lanes each way between some junctions.

A1 Morpeth to Ellingham
The announcement then said that the road from Morpeth to Ellingham would be upgraded to dual carriageway. The selection of the preferred route was scheduled for the year 2017, with construction due to begin in 2019. In response to questions regarding transport in the north, Highways England stated that a new dual carriageway section between Morpeth and Felton and also that of Alnwick to Ellingham would start in 2021 with full opening in 2023.  However in June 2022 UK government minister Grant Shapps delayed a decision about a Development Consent Order signing off on National Highways' plans until December 2022.

A1 North of Ellingham
Measures were also announced to enhance the performance and safety of the A1 north of Ellingham to include three sections of climbing lanes, five junctions with improved right turn refuges, and better crossing facilities for pedestrians and cyclists. Start of construction is scheduled for 2018.

Ellington to Fen Ditton scheme

The planned A14 Ellington to Fen Ditton scheme would require a new junction at Brampton, north of which the A1 will be widened to a three-lane dual carriageway from Brampton to the Brampton Hut interchange. The new two-lane dual carriageway section of the A14 would run parallel with the A1 on this section.

Black Cat roundabout replacement

The same announcement in December 2014 said that the A1/A421 Black Cat Roundabout would be replaced with a grade-separated junction, just a few years after this roundabout was expensively upgraded. As of late 2023 the  multi level juction planned at the Blackcat has begun contruction, this to allow the A1/A421/A428 to be upgraded. When completed this will remove one of the last 5 roundabouts on the A1 from Strling corner to the Berwick bypass.

A46 Newark northern bypass scheme

It was then also announced that planning would begin to upgrade the Newark northern bypass to dual carriageway, and the A46 junction with the A1 will be replaced to support nearby housing growth and improve links from the A1 to Newark and Lincoln.

A1(M) Doncaster By-pass
It was also announced that the Doncaster By-pass, which is the oldest stretch of two-lane motorway still in service, would be upgraded to dual three lanes. This will relieve local congestion and provide the capacity needed to make the A1 an alternative (and better) strategic route to the north east.

Sandy-Beeston By-pass

In 2003 a proposal for a bypass of Sandy and Beeston, Bedfordshire, was put forward as a green-lighted scheme as part of a government multi-modal study, with a cost of £67 million. However, the Highways Agency was unwilling to confirm the information as the study was preliminary and intended for future publication. In 2008 the proposal was submitted for consideration in the pre-2013/14 Regional Funding Advice 2 Programme of the East of England Development Agency.

A1(M) technology enhancements and upgrades; A1 East of England feasibility study
It was also announced in 2014 that new technology would be implemented to bring the road to motorway standards, including detection loops, CCTV cameras and variable message signs to provide better information for drivers and active traffic management across Tyne and Wear, while Junction 6 (Welwyn North) to Junction 8 (Hitchin) would be upgraded to smart motorway, including widening of a two-lane section to dual three lanes and hard shoulder running. This plan to upgrade to smart motorway has now been cancelled.

A strategic study will examine how to improve the safety and performance of the A1 between Peterborough and the M25, including whether to upgrade the old dual carriageway section to motorway standard.

Other proposals
The Highways Agency has been investigating an upgrade of the A1 Newcastle/Gateshead Western Bypass to dual three-lane motorway standard to alleviate heavy congestion which in recent years has become a recurrent problem.

Improvements to junctions near the village of Elkesley, Nottinghamshire are planned: the village's only access to the rest of the road network is via the A1.

Consideration is being given to widening the Brampton Hut interchange to Alconbury sections to a three-lane dual carriageway.

A1(M)

Some sections of the A1 have been upgraded to motorway standard. These are known as the A1(M) and include:

M25 to Stotfold

The M25 to Stotfold section is , and was constructed between 1962 and 1986. The main destinations are Hatfield, Welwyn Garden City, Stevenage, and Letchworth. It opened in five stages: junctions 1 to 2 in 1979; 2 to 4 in 1986; 4 to 6 in 1973; 6 to 8 in 1962; and 8 to 10 in 1967.

Alconbury to Peterborough

The Alconbury to Peterborough section is , and opened in 1998.

Doncaster Bypass

The Doncaster By-pass opened in 1961 and is one of the oldest sections of motorway in Britain. It is  long, and runs from Blyth to Carcroft.

Darrington to Gateshead

The Darrington to Gateshead section was constructed between 1965 and 2018. It is , and opened in sections:
 Junctions 56 to 59 in 1965
 Junctions 59 to 63 in 1969
 Junctions 63 to 65 in 1970
 Walshford to 49 in 1995
 Junctions 43 to 44 in 1999
When this section opened it ended at a temporary terminus south of the M1. There was a final exit into Micklefield Village for non-motorway traffic onto what is now the access road. During the first week of June 2009, Junctions 44 and 45 were renumbered 43 and 44. At the same time the A1/A659 Grange Moor junction became A1(M) Junction 45. As a result many atlases show incorrect junction numbering for this stretch of motorway.
 Junction 46 to temporary junction at Walshford opened in 2005
 Junction 40 to south of 43 opened in 2005 & 2006
The northern section of the upgrade, bypassing Fairburn village opened in April 2005 with a temporary connection with the A1 between Fairburn and Brotherton. The southern section, with a free-flow interchange with the M62 motorway opened on 13 January 2006.
 Junctions 44 to 46 opened in 2009
 Junctions 49 to 51 opened as of 31 March 2012. Work began in March 2009 to upgrade the Dishforth to Leeming section to dual three-lane motorway standard with existing connections being replaced by two new junctions. This work was completed on 31 March 2012.
 Junctions 51 to 56 opened in 2017 & 2018.

In popular culture
The A1 is celebrated in song. It is mentioned by Jethro Tull on the title track of the album Too Old to Rock 'n' Roll: Too Young to Die! "Up on the A1 by Scotch Corner". "Scotch Corner", by the Welsh band Man, on the album Rhinos, Winos and Lunatics is about an encounter there. Near the southern end, signs saying "Hatfield and the North" inspired the eponymous 1970s rock band Hatfield and the North. The A1(M) is mentioned in the song "Gabadon" by Sheffield band, Haze.

Junctions

References

External links

 BiffVernon: A1-The Great North Road
 A1 at Roader's Digest (SABRE)
 roadsUK: A1

Motorways in England
Roads in England
Roads in Scotland
Transport in the London Borough of Barnet
Transport in the London Borough of Islington
Transport in Bedfordshire
Transport in East Lothian
Transport in Edinburgh
Roads in Hertfordshire
Transport in Lincolnshire
Transport in Northumberland
Roads in Nottinghamshire
Transport in the Scottish Borders
Transport in Tyne and Wear
Roads in Yorkshire
Boroughbridge

A1 road (Great Britain)


SpellForce 2: Dragon Storm is a video game, a combination of real-time strategy and role-playing, created by German game developers Phenomic as an expansion to their 2006 release SpellForce 2: Shadow Wars after following the previous games SpellForce: The Order of Dawn.

Gameplay
SpellForce 2: Dragon Storm comes with a campaign scenario, Skirmish Mode, free play mode (which allows the players to run the game without any known missions). Throughout the storyline the player will encounter many new allies or enemies, depending on what the player decides to do.

Plot

Characters
Throughout the storyline the player encounters many new creatures, cults, and civilizations. However, some characters from the previous Spellforce 2 reappear depending on the mission.

As with SpellForce 2, the player controls the Shaikan avatar who tries to save others, the player's main goals being to search for a reason behind the collapsing portals.  As the game progresses, the player uncovers new continents and an ancient style boat ship to help accomplish missions.

Story
The main character controlled by the player is a Shaikan, or a character who has the blood of a dragon. This dragon blood allows resurrection of oneself and followers, as well as the ability to summon followers from different parts of the world instantly to one's side.

The story begins with an attack on the Dwarven homeland, which starts a series of quests through different lands in order to gather assistance and clues. The expansion pack gives the player the chance to play as the Shaikan fully and provides a set of Shaikan buildings and units which will prove useful during the quests.

During the story the player will encounter the original characters from the previous game including areas, some of the areas of the coming years have evolved and look different throughout the game.

The Dark Elf are still at war, as well as the orcs, which appear on the first level and second level and throughout the storyline.

Reception

Dragon Storm was generally received positively.

References

External links
SpellForce 2: Dragon Storm Homepage

2007 video games
DreamCatcher Interactive games
Fantasy video games
JoWooD Entertainment games
Real-time strategy video games
Role-playing video games
Video game expansion packs
Video games developed in Germany
Video games with gender-selectable protagonists
Windows games
Windows-only games

SpellForce 2: Dragon Storm


David Earl Nichols (born December 23, 1944, Covington, Kentucky) is an American pharmacologist and medicinal chemist.
Previously the Robert C. and Charlotte P. Anderson Distinguished Chair in Pharmacology at Purdue University, Nichols has worked in the field of psychoactive drugs since 1969.  While still a graduate student, he patented the method that is used to make the optical isomers of hallucinogenic amphetamines.  His contributions include the synthesis and reporting of escaline, LSZ, 6-APB, 2C-I-NBOMe and other NBOMe variants (NBOMe-2C-B, NBOMe-2C-C, NBOMe-2C-D), and several others, as well as the coining of the term "entactogen".

He is the founding president of the Heffter Research Institute, named after German chemist and pharmacologist Arthur Heffter, who first discovered that mescaline was the active component in the peyote cactus.  In 2004 he was named the Irwin H. Page Lecturer by the former International Serotonin Club (now the International Society for Serotonin Research), and delivered an address in Portugal titled, "35 years studying psychedelics: what a long strange trip it's been."  Among pharmacologists, he is considered to be one of the world's top experts on psychedelics. Nichols's other professional activities include teaching medicinal chemistry and molecular pharmacology at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN, and teaching medical students at the Indiana University School of Medicine. He officially retired in 2012 but has continued to work for the simple reason that nobody is in the position to continue his work, and he is considering writing an autobiography. He is currently an adjunct professor at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, Chapel Hill, NC.

Education

BS - 1969 - University of Cincinnati
PhD - 1973 - University of Iowa
Postdoc Work - 1973-74 - University of Iowa

Research areas

Nichols is still carrying out academic research on the chemistry of psychedelics. He has published approximately 250 scientific reports and book chapters, all describing the relationship between the structure of a molecule and its biological effects (often referred to as a Structure-activity relationship, or SAR).  He has done extensive work using the rat model assay of drug discrimination in characterizing hallucinogenic drugs.  Although his research mostly uses rats, a number of compounds included in Shulgin's PIHKAL were actually first synthesized in Nichols's lab.  His lab also first developed [125I]-(R)-DOI as a radioligand.  Nichols is one of the few people who has published legitimate research on the chemistry and pharmacology of LSD in the last 20 years, and first reported that several LSD analogues, including ETH-LAD, PRO-LAD, and AL-LAD, were more potent than LSD itself.  Their human effects are described in TiHKAL.  He also improved the synthesis of psilocybin so that it could be accessible for several recent clinical studies.

Other notable research that he helped carry out includes extensive studies of the structure-activity relationships and mechanisms of action of MDA and MDMA, during which he helped to discover many novel analogues including such compounds as 5-methyl-MDA, 4-MTA and MDAI. Nichols has said that "he believes gray-market chemists used information from papers he published on 4-methylthioamphetamine (MTA) in the 1990s to synthesize the drug, which they sold in tablets nicknamed "flatliners" as a substitute for MDMA (Ecstasy)."

More recently, Nichols has become one of the world leaders in research on dopamine, and his team has developed several notable dopamine receptor ligands, including the selective D1 full agonist compounds dihydrexidine and dinapsoline which have been researched for the treatment of Parkinson's disease, as well as a number of other subtype-selective dopamine agonists derived from dinoxyline. He co-founded DarPharma, Inc. to commercialize his dopamine compounds; several of his team's compounds are now being studied in clinical trials for the treatment of Parkinson's disease and the cognitive and memory deficits of schizophrenia.

Impact on the designer drug market

Designer drug producers who scan scientific literature for information on compounds with potential grey market value have described Nichols' publications as an "especially valuable" road map to making new designer drugs. Several deaths have been attributed to compounds that have been discovered in Nichols' lab, which he finds quite upsetting, "I was stunned by this revelation, and it left me with a hollow and depressed feeling for some time."

See also

 Alexander Shulgin
 Jonathan Ott
 Rick Strassman
Casey William Hardison
 Bromo-DragonFLY
 TCB-2
 25I-NBOMe
 Lysergic acid 2,4-dimethylazetidide
 4-MTA
 MDAI
 Dihydrexidine
 Dinapsoline

References

Further reading
 The Medicinal Chemistry of Phenethylamine Psychedelics
 LSD and Its Lysergamide Cousins

External links
 Purdue University - Nichols
 Erowid Character Vaults: David E. Nichols
 Heffter Research Institute
 LSD Neuroscience Nichols's lecture in Psychedelic Science 2013 conference.
 Advances In Understanding How Psychedelics Work In The Brain Nichols's lecture in the Psychedelic Science in the 21st Century conference in 2010.
 David E. Nichols interviewed by Jan Irvin (2010)

1944 births
Living people
American pharmacologists
21st-century American chemists
Psychedelic drug researchers
University of Cincinnati alumni
University of Iowa alumni
Purdue University faculty
Indiana University faculty

David E. Nichols


Camellia is a genus of flowering plants in the family Theaceae, native to eastern and southern Asia from the Himalaya east to Japan and Indonesia. Scientists are still discussing how many species there are. The number of species varies between 100 and 250. Linnaeus named the genus inhonour of Fr. Georg Joseph Kamel, a Jesuit botanist. amel brought C. japonica from Manila to Spain.

They are evergreen shrubs and small trees from 2–20 m tall. The leaves are alternately arranged, simple, thick, serrated, usually glossy, and 3–17 cm long. The flowers are large and conspicuous, 1–12 cm diameter, with (in natural conditions) 5–9 petals; colour varies from white to pink and red, and yellow in a few species. The fruit is a dry capsule subdivided into 1–5 compartments, each containing 1–8 seeds.

The genus is generally adapted to acidic soils, and does not grow well on chalk or other calcium-rich soils. Most species also have a high rainfall requirement and will not tolerate drought.

Camellia species are used as food plants by the larvae of a number of butterfly species.

Cultivation and uses
Camellia sinensis is very important commercially since tea is made from its leaves. Tea oil is a sweet seasoning and cooking oil made by pressing the seeds of Camellia sinensis or Camellia oleifera.

Many other camellias are grown as ornamental plants for their flowers; about 3,000 cultivars and hybrids have been selected, many with double flowers, as in the gallery below. Camellia japonica (often simply called Camellia) is the most prominent species in cultivation, with over 2,000 named cultivars; next are C. reticulata, with over 400 named cultivars, and C. sasanqua, with over 300 named cultivars. Popular hybrids include C. × hiemalis (C. japonica × C. sasanqua) and C. × williamsii (C. japonica × C. salouenensis). They are highly valued in Japan and elsewhere for their very early flowering, often among the first flowers to appear in the late winter. Late frosts can damage the flowers.

Camellias have a slow growth rate. Typically they will grow about 30 centimetres a year until mature although this varies depending on variety and location.

Camellia japonica is the state flower of Alabama as well as the city flower of the Chinese municipality Chongqing.

Famous Camellia aficionados
 HM The Queen Mother grew Camellia in all of her gardens. As her body was taken from Royal Lodge, Windsor to lie in state at Westminster Hall of the Palace of Westminster, a Camellia from her own gardens was placed on top of the flag draped coffin
 Coco Chanel was very well known for wearing a white Camellia
 Alexandre Dumas, fils named his most famous novel The Lady of the Camellias (1848) after the significance this plant played in the story.
 Ralph Peer, the music industry pioneer often credited as the Father of Country Music, was a former president of the American Camellia Society.

Other websites

 The International Camellia Society
 The American Camellia Society

Camellia


In computer engineering, microarchitecture (sometimes abbreviated to µarch or uarch) is a description of the electrical circuitry of a computer, central processing unit, or digital signal processor that is sufficient for completely describing the operation of the hardware.

Scholars use the term "computer organization" while people in the computer industry more often say, "microarchitecture".  Microarchitecture and instruction set architecture (ISA), together, constitute the field of computer architecture.

Origin of the term

Computers have been using microprogramming of control logic since the 1950s.  The CPU decodes the instructions and sends signals down appropriate paths by means of transistor switches. The bits inside the microprogram words controlled the processor at the level of electrical signals.

The term: microarchitecture was used to describe the units that were controlled by the microprogram words, in contrast to the term: "architecture" that was visible and documented for programmers. While architecture usually had to be compatible between hardware generations, the underlying microarchitecture could be easily changed.

Relation to instruction set architecture
The microarchitecture is related to, but not the same as, the instruction set architecture. The instruction set architecture is near to the programming model of a processor as seen by an assembly language programmer or compiler writer, which includes the execution model, processor registers, memory address modes, address and data formats, etc. The microarchitecture (or computer organization) is mainly a lower level structure and therefore manage a large number of details that are hidden in the programming model. It describes the inside parts of the processor and how they work together in order to implement the architectural specification.

Microarchitectual elements may be everything from single logic gates, to registers, lookup tables, multiplexers, counters, etc., to complete ALUs, FPUs and even larger elements. The electronic circuitry level can, in turn, be subdivided into transistor-level details, such as which basic gate-building structures are used and what logic implementation types (static/dynamic, number of phases, etc.) are chosen, in addition to the actual logic design used built them.

A few important points:
A single microarchitecture, especially if it includes microcode, can be used to implement many different instruction sets, by means of changing the control store. This can be quite complicated however, even when simplified by microcode and/or table structures in ROMs or PLAs.
Two machines may have the same microarchitecture, and so the same block diagram, but completely different hardware implementations. This manages both the level of the electronic circuitry and even more the physical level of manufacturing (of both ICs and/or discrete components).
Machines with different microarchitectures may have the same instruction set architecture, and so both are capable of executing the same programs. New microarchitectures and/or circuitry solutions, along with advances in semiconductor manufacturing, are what allows newer generations of processors to achieve higher performance.

Simplified descriptions
A very simplified high level description — common in marketing — may show only fairly basic characteristics, such as bus-widths, along with various types of execution units and other large systems, such as branch prediction and cache memories, pictured as simple blocks — perhaps with some important attributes or characteristics noted. Some details regarding pipeline structure (like fetch, decode, assign, execute, write-back) may sometimes also be included.

Aspects of microarchitecture

The pipelined datapath is the most commonly used datapath design in microarchitecture today. This technique is used in most modern microprocessors, microcontrollers, and DSPs. The pipelined architecture allows multiple instructions to overlap in execution, much like an assembly line. The pipeline includes several different stages which are fundamental in microarchitecture designs. Some of these stages include instruction fetch, instruction decode, execute, and write back. Some architectures include other stages such as memory access. The design of pipelines is one of the central microarchitectural tasks.

Execution units are also essential to microarchitecture. Execution units include arithmetic logic units (ALU), floating point units (FPU), load/store units, and branch prediction.  These units perform the operations or calculations of the processor.  The choice of the number of execution units, their latency and throughput are important microarchitectural design tasks.  The size, latency, throughput and connectivity of memories within the system are also microarchitectural decisions.

System-level design decisions such as whether or not to include peripherals, such as memory controllers, can be considered part of the microarchitectural design process.  This includes decisions on the performance-level and connectivity of these peripherals.

Unlike architectural design, where a specific performance level is the main goal, microarchitectural design pays closer attention to other constraints.  Attention must be paid to such issues as:

 Chip area/cost.
 Power consumption.
 Logic complexity.
 Ease of connectivity.
 Manufacturability.
 Ease of debugging.
 Testability.

Micro-Architectural Concepts
In general, all CPUs, single-chip microprocessors or multi-chip implementations run programs by performing the following steps:
 Read an instruction and decode it.
 Find any associated data that is needed to process the instruction.
 Process the instruction.
 Write the results out.

Complicating this simple-looking series of steps is the fact that the memory hierarchy, which includes caching, main memory and non-volatile storage like hard disks, (where the program instructions and data are) has always been slower than the processor itself. Step (2) often introduces a delay (in CPU terms often called a "stall") while the data arrives over the computer bus. A big amount of research has been put into designs that avoid these delays as much as possible. Over the years, a central design goal was to execute more instructions in parallel, thus increasing the effective execution speed of a program. These efforts introduced complicated logic and circuit structures.
In the past such techniques could only be implemented on expensive mainframes or supercomputers due to the amount of circuitry needed for these techniques. As semiconductor manufacturing progressed, more and more of these techniques could be implemented on a single semiconductor chip.

What follows is a survey of micro-architectural techniques that are common in modern CPUs.

Instruction Set choice
The choice of which Instruction Set Architecture to use greatly affects the complexity of implementing high performance devices. Over the years, computer designers did their best to simplify instruction sets, in order to enable higher performance implementations by saving designers effort and time for features which improve performance rather than wasting them on the complexity of instruction set.

Instruction set design has progressed from CISC, RISC, VLIW, EPIC types. Architectures that are dealing with data parallelism include SIMD and Vectors.

Instruction pipelining

One of the first, and most powerful, techniques to improve performance is the use of the instruction pipeline. Early processor designs performed all of the steps above on one instruction before moving onto the next. Large portions of the processor circuitry were left idle at any one step; for instance, the instruction decoding circuitry would be idle during execution and so on.

Pipelines improve performance by allowing a number of instructions to work their way through the processor at the same time. In the same basic example, the processor would start to decode (step 1) a new instruction while the last one was waiting for results. This would allow up to four instructions to be "in flight" at one time, making the processor look four times as fast. Although any one instruction takes just as long to complete (there are still four steps) the CPU as a whole "retires" instructions much faster and can be run at a much higher clock speed.

Cache

Improvements in chip manufacturing allowed more circuitry to be placed on the same chip, and designers started looking for ways to use it. One of the most common ways was to add an ever-increasing amount of cache memory on-chip. Cache is a very fast memory, memory that can be accessed in a few cycles as compared to what is needed to talk to main memory. The CPU includes a cache controller which automates reading and writing from the cache, if the data is already in the cache it simply "appears," whereas if it is not the processor is "stalled" while the cache controller reads it in.

RISC designs started adding cache in the mid-to-late 1980s, often only 4 KB in total. This number grew over time, and typical CPUs now have about 512 KB, while more powerful CPUs come with 1 or 2 or even 4, 6, 8 or 12 MB, organized in multiple levels of a memory hierarchy. Generally speaking, more cache means more speed.

Caches and pipelines were a perfect match for each other. Previously, it didn't make much sense to build a pipeline that could run faster than the access latency of off-chip cash memory. Using on-chip cache memory instead, meant that a pipeline could run at the speed of the cache access latency, a much smaller length of time. This allowed the operating frequencies of processors to increase at a much faster rate than that of off-chip memory.

Branch Prediction and Speculative execution

Pipeline stalls and flushes due to branches are the two main things preventing achieving higher performance through instruction level parallelism. The from time that the processor's instruction decoder has found that it has encountered a conditional branch instruction to the time that the deciding jumping register value can be read out, the pipeline might be stalled for several cycles. On average, every fifth instruction executed is a branch, so that's a high amount of stalling. If the branch is taken, its even worse, as then all of the subsequent instructions which were in the pipeline needs to be flushed.

Techniques such as branch prediction and speculative execution are used to reduce these branch penalties. Branch prediction is  where the hardware makes educated guesses on whether a particular branch will be taken. The guess allows the hardware to prefetch instructions without waiting for the register read. Speculative execution is a further enhancement in which the code along the predicted path is executed before it is known whether the branch should be taken or not.

Out-of-order execution

The addition of caches reduces the frequency or duration of stalls due to waiting for data to be fetched from the main memory hierarchy, but does not get rid of these stalls entirely. In early designs a cache miss would force the cache controller to stall the processor and wait. Of course there may be some other instruction in the program whose data is available in the cache at that point. Out-of-order execution allows that ready instruction to be processed while an older instruction waits on the cache, then re-orders the results to make it appear that everything happened in the programmed order.

Superscalar

Even with all of the added complexity and gates needed to support the concepts outlined above, improvements in semiconductor manufacturing soon allowed even more logic gates to be used.

In the outline above the processor processes parts of a single instruction at a time. Computer programs could be executed faster if multiple instructions were processed simultaneously. This is what superscalar processors achieve, by replicating functional units such as ALUs. The replication of functional units was only made possible when the integrated circuit (some times called "die") area of a single-issue processor no longer stretched the limits of what could be reliably manufactured. By the late 1980s, superscalar designs started to enter the market place.

In modern designs it is common to find two load units, one store (many instructions have no results to store), two or more integer math units, two or more floating point units, and often a SIMD unit of some sort. The instruction issue logic grows in complexity by reading in a huge list of instructions from memory and handing them off to the different execution units that are idle at that point. The results are then collected and re-ordered at the end.

Register renaming

Register renaming refers to a technique used to avoid unnecessary serialized execution of program instructions because of the reuse of the same registers by those instructions. Suppose we have to groups of instruction that will use the same register, one set of instruction is executed first to leave the register to the other set, but if the other set is assigned to a different similar register both sets of instructions can be executed in parallel.

Multiprocessing and multithreading
Due to the growing gap between CPU operating frequencies and DRAM access times, none of the techniques that enhance instruction-level parallelism (ILP) within one program could overcome the long stalls (delays) that occurred when data had to be fetched from main memory. Additionally, the large transistor counts and high operating frequencies needed for the more advanced ILP techniques required power dissipation levels that could no longer be cheaply cooled. For these reasons, newer generations of computers have started to utilize higher levels of parallelism that exist outside of a single program or program thread.

This trend is sometimes known as "throughput computing". This idea originated in the mainframe market where online transaction processing emphasized not just the execution speed of one transaction, but the capacity to deal with big numbers of transactions at the same time. With transaction-based applications such as network routing and web-site serving greatly increasing in the last decade, the computer industry has re-emphasized capacity and throughput issues.

One technique of how this parallelism is achieved is through multiprocessing systems, computer systems with multiple CPUs. In the past this was reserved for high-end mainframes but now small scale (2-8) multiprocessors servers have become commonplace for the small business market. For large corporations, large scale (16-256) multiprocessors are common. Even personal computers with multiple CPUs have appeared since the 1990s.

Advances in semiconductor technology reduced transistor size; multicore CPUs have appeared where multiple CPUs are implemented on the same silicon chip. Initially used in-chips targeting embedded markets, where simpler and smaller CPUs would allow multiple instantiations to fit on one piece of silicon. By 2005, semiconductor technology allowed dual high-end desktop CPUs CMP chips to be manufactured in volume. Some designs, such as UltraSPARC T1 used a simpler (scalar, in-order) designs in order to fit more processors on one piece of silicon.

Recently, another technique that has become more popular is multithreading. In multithreading, when the processor has to fetch data from slow system memory, instead of stalling for the data to arrive, the processor switches to another program or program thread which is ready to execute. Though this does not speed up a particular program/thread, it increases the overall system throughput by reducing the time the CPU is idle.

Conceptually, multithreading is equivalent to a context switch at the operating system level. The difference is that a multithreaded CPU can do a thread switch in one CPU cycle instead of the hundreds or thousands of CPU cycles a context switch normally requires. This is achieved by replicating the state hardware (such as the register file and program counter) for each active thread.

A further enhancement is simultaneous multithreading. This technique allows superscalar CPUs to execute instructions from different programs/threads simultaneously in the same cycle.

Related pages

 Microprocessor
 Microcontroller
 Multi-core processor
 Digital signal processor
 CPU design
 Datapath
 instruction-level parallelism (ILP)

Footnotes
  In the context of the organization of a central processing unit, an operator is a collection of logic gates that comprises a functional unit within the processor, such as a barrel shifter or a final adder.
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References

Further reading

IEEE Computer Society
PC Processor Microarchitecture

Computer architecture

Microarchitecture


William John Macquorn Rankine  (; 5 July 1820 – 24 December 1872) was a Scottish mechanical engineer who also contributed to civil engineering, physics and mathematics. He was a founding contributor, with Rudolf Clausius and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), to the science of thermodynamics, particularly focusing on its First Law. He developed the Rankine scale, a Fahrenheit-based equivalent to the Celsius-based Kelvin scale of temperature.

Rankine developed a complete theory of the steam engine and indeed of all heat engines. His manuals of engineering science and practice were used for many decades after their publication in the 1850s and 1860s. He published several hundred papers and notes on science and engineering topics, from 1840 onwards, and his interests were extremely varied, including, in his youth, botany, music theory and number theory, and, in his mature years, most major branches of science, mathematics and engineering.

He was an enthusiastic amateur singer, pianist and cellist who composed his own humorous songs.

Life
Rankine was born in Edinburgh to Lt David Rankin (sic), a civil engineer from a military background, who later worked on the Edinburgh and Dalkeith Railway (locally known as the Innocent Railway). His mother was Barbara Grahame, of a prominent legal and banking family.

His father moved around Scotland on various projects and the family moved with him. William was initially educated at home but he later attended Ayr Academy (1828–29) and then the High School of Glasgow (1830). Around 1830 the family moved to Edinburgh when the father got a post as Manager of the Edinburgh to Dalkeith Railway. The family then lived at 2 Arniston Place.

In 1834 he was sent to the Scottish Naval and Military Academy on Lothian Road in Edinburgh with the mathematician George Lee. By that year William was already highly proficient in mathematics and received, as a gift from his uncle, Isaac Newton's Principia (1687) in the original Latin.

In 1836, Rankine began to study a spectrum of scientific topics at the University of Edinburgh, including natural history under Robert Jameson and natural philosophy under James David Forbes. Under Forbes he was awarded prizes for essays on methods of physical inquiry and on the undulatory (or wave) theory of light. During vacations, he assisted his father who, from 1830, was manager and, later, effective treasurer and engineer of the Edinburgh and Dalkeith Railway which brought coal into the growing city. He left the University of Edinburgh in 1838 without a degree (which was not then unusual) and, perhaps because of straitened family finances, became an apprentice to Sir John Benjamin Macneill, who was at the time surveyor to the Irish Railway Commission. During his pupilage he developed a technique, later known as Rankine's method, for laying out railway curves, fully exploiting the theodolite and making a substantial improvement in accuracy and productivity over existing methods. In fact, the technique was simultaneously in use by other engineers – and in the 1860s there was a minor dispute about Rankine's priority.

The year 1842 also marked Rankine's first attempt to reduce the phenomena of heat to a mathematical form but he was frustrated by his lack of experimental data. At the time of Queen Victoria's visit to Scotland, later that year, he organised a large bonfire situated on Arthur's Seat, constructed with radiating air passages under the fuel. The bonfire served as a beacon to initiate a chain of other bonfires across Scotland.

In 1850 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh his proposer being Prof James David Forbes. He won the Society's Keith Prize for the period 1851–53. He served as the Society's Vice President from 1871 to 1872.

From 1855 he was Professor of Civil Engineering and Mechanics at Glasgow University.

He died at 8 Albion Crescent (now called Dowanside Road), Dowanhill, Glasgow at 11:45pm on Christmas Eve, 24 December 1872, aged only 52. He was unmarried and had no children.  His death was registered by his uncle, Alex Grahame (his late mother's brother in law).

Thermodynamics
Undaunted, Rankine returned to his youthful fascination with the mechanics of the heat engine. Though his theory of circulating streams of elastic vortices whose volumes spontaneously adapted to their environment sounds fanciful to scientists formed on a modern account, by 1849, he had succeeded in finding the relationship between saturated vapour pressure and temperature. The following year, he used his theory to establish relationships between the temperature, pressure and density of gases, and expressions for the latent heat of evaporation of a liquid. He accurately predicted the surprising fact that the apparent specific heat of saturated steam would be negative.

Emboldened by his success, in 1851 he set out to calculate the efficiency of heat engines and used his theory as a basis to deduce the principle, that the maximum efficiency possible for any heat engine is a function only of the two temperatures between which it operates. Though a similar result had already been derived by Rudolf Clausius and William Thomson, Rankine claimed that his result rested upon his hypothesis of molecular vortices alone, rather than upon Carnot's theory or some other additional assumption. The work marked the first step on Rankine's journey to develop a more complete theory of heat. In 1853, he coined the term potential energy.

Rankine later recast the results of his molecular theories in terms of a macroscopic account of energy and its transformations. He defined and distinguished between actual energy which was lost in dynamic processes and potential energy by which it was replaced. He assumed the sum of the two energies to be constant, an idea already, although surely not for very long, familiar in the law of conservation of energy. From 1854, he made wide use of his thermodynamic function which he later realised was identical to the entropy of Clausius. By 1855, Rankine had formulated a science of energetics which gave an account of dynamics in terms of energy and its transformations rather than force and motion. This article presents the first published definition of energy in terms of capacity for performing work, which quickly became the standard general definition of energy.   The theory was very influential in the 1890s. In 1859 he proposed the Rankine scale of temperature, an absolute or thermodynamic scale whose degree is equal to a Fahrenheit degree. In 1862, Rankine expanded Lord Kelvin's theory of universal heat death and, along with Kelvin himself, formulated the heat death paradox, which disproves the possibly of an infinitely old universe.

Energetics offered Rankine an alternative, and rather more mainstream, approach, to his science and, from the mid-1850s, he made rather less use of his molecular vortices. Yet he still claimed that Maxwell's work on electromagnetics was effectively an extension of his model. And, in 1864, he contended that the microscopic theories of heat proposed by Clausius and James Clerk Maxwell, based on linear atomic motion, were inadequate. It was only in 1869 that Rankine admitted the success of these rival theories. By that time, his own model of the atom had become almost identical with that of Thomson.

As was his constant aim, especially as a teacher of engineering, he used his own theories to develop a number of practical results and to elucidate their physical principles including:

The Rankine–Hugoniot equation for propagation of shock waves, governs the behaviour of shock waves normal to the oncoming flow. It is named after physicists Rankine and the French engineer Pierre Henri Hugoniot;
The Rankine cycle, an analysis of an ideal heat-engine with a condensor. Like other thermodynamic cycles, the maximum efficiency of the Rankine cycle is given by calculating the maximum efficiency of the Carnot cycle;
Properties of steam, gases and vapours.

The history of rotordynamics is replete with the interplay of theory and practice. Rankine first performed an analysis of a spinning shaft in 1869, but his model was not adequate and he predicted that supercritical speeds could not be attained.

Fatigue studies

Rankine was one of the first engineers to recognise that fatigue failures of railway axles was caused by the initiation and growth of brittle cracks. In the early 1840s he examined many broken axles, especially after the Versailles train crash of 1842 when a locomotive axle suddenly fractured and led to the death of over 50 passengers. He showed that the axles had failed by progressive growth of a brittle crack from a shoulder or other stress concentration source on the shaft, such as a keyway. He was supported by similar direct analysis of failed axles by Joseph Glynn, where the axles failed by slow growth of a brittle crack in a process now known as metal fatigue. It was likely that the front axle of one of the locomotives involved in the Versailles train crash failed in a similar way. Rankine presented his conclusions in a paper delivered to the Institution of Civil Engineers. His work was ignored however, by many engineers who persisted in believing that stress could cause "re-crystallisation" of the metal, a myth which has persisted even to recent times. The theory of recrystallisation was quite wrong, and inhibited worthwhile research until the work of William Fairbairn a few years later, which showed the weakening effect of repeated flexure on large beams. Nevertheless, fatigue remained a serious and poorly understood phenomenon, and was the root cause of many accidents on the railways and elsewhere. It is still a serious problem, but at least is much better understood today, and so can be prevented by careful design.

Other work

Rankine served as Regius Professor of Civil Engineering and Mechanics at the University of Glasgow from November 1855 until his death in December 1872, pursuing engineering research along a number of lines in civil and mechanical engineering.

Rankine was instrumental in the formation of the forerunner of Glasgow University Officer Training Corps, the 2nd Lanarkshire Rifle Volunteer Corps at Glasgow University in July 1859, becoming Major in 1860 after it was formed into the first company of the 2nd Battalion, 1st Lanarkshire Rifle Volunteer Corps; he served until 1864, when he resigned due to pressure of work – much of it associated with Naval Architecture.

Civil engineering
The Rankine Lectures, organised by the British Geotechnical Association, are named in recognition of the significant contributions Rankine made to:
Forces in frame structures;
Soil mechanics; most notably in lateral earth pressure theory and the stabilization of retaining walls. The Rankine method of earth pressure analysis is named after him.

Naval architecture
Rankine worked closely with Clyde shipbuilders, especially his friend and lifelong collaborator James Robert Napier, to make naval architecture into an engineering science. He was a founding member, and first President of the Institution of Engineers & Shipbuilders in Scotland in 1857. He was an early member of the Royal Institution of Naval Architects (founded 1860) and attended many of its annual meetings. With William Thomson and others, Rankine was a member of the board of enquiry into the controversial sinking of HMS Captain.

Awards and honours
Fellow of the Royal Scottish Society of Arts
Associate of the Institution of Civil Engineers, 1843 (he was never a full Member)
Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1850
Fellow of the Royal Society of London, 1853
Keith Medal of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1854
Founding President of the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland, 1857
LL.D. from Trinity College, Dublin, 1857
Foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, 1868
The Rankine absolute Fahrenheit scale is named in his honour.
Rankine, a small impact crater near the eastern limb of the Moon, is also named in his honour.
In 2013 he was one of four inductees to the Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame.

Publications
Books
 Manual of Applied Mechanics (1858)
 Manual of the Steam Engine and Other Prime Movers (1859)
 Manual of Civil Engineering (1861)
 Shipbuilding, theoretical and practical (1866)
 Manual of Machinery and Millwork (1869)

Papers
 On the Mechanical Action of Heat, especially in Gases and Vapours (1850), read at the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 4 February 1850
 On the General Law of Transformation of Energy (1853), read at the Glasgow Philosophical Society
 On the Thermodynamic Theory of Waves of Finite Longitudinal Disturbance (1869)
 Outlines of the Science of Energetics (1855), read at the Glasgow Philosophical Society
This work influenced French physicist Pierre Duhem's Traité de l'énergétique (1911) in which he considered thermodynamics, not classical mechanics, to be the more fundamental theory.

About Rankine

See also
Momentum theory
State function
Track transition curve

References

External links

 J. Macquorn Rankine

1820 births
1872 deaths
Academics of the University of Glasgow
Alumni of the University of Edinburgh
Fellows of the Royal Society
Fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh
Fluid dynamicists
Creators of temperature scales
Geotechnical engineers
British naval architects
Members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
People educated at Ayr Academy
Engineers from Edinburgh
Presidents of the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland
Scottish civil engineers
19th-century Scottish writers
Thermodynamicists
Scottish mechanical engineers
Scottish Engineering Hall of Fame inductees
19th-century Scottish businesspeople
Scientists from Edinburgh

William Rankine


The Roland is a Franco-German mobile short-range surface-to-air missile (SAM) system. The Roland was also purchased by the U.S. Army as one of very few foreign SAM systems.

Development

Roland was designed to a joint French and German requirement for a low-level mobile missile system to protect mobile field formations and fixed, high-value targets such as airfields. Development began in 1963 as a study by Nord Aviation of France and Bölkow of Germany with the system then called SABA in France and P-250 in Germany. The two companies formed a joint development project in 1964 and later (as Aérospatiale of France and MBB of Germany) founded the Euromissile company for this and other missile programs. Aerospatiale took primary responsibility for the Roland 1 day/clear-weather system while MBB took primary responsibility for the Roland 2 all-weather system. Aerospatiale was also responsible for the rear and propulsion system of the missile while MBB developed the front end of the missile with warhead and guidance systems. The first guided launch of a Roland prototype took place in June 1968, destroying a Nord Aviation CT20  target drone and fielding of production systems was expected from January 1970. The test and evaluation phase took much longer than originally anticipated with the clear-weather Roland I finally entering operational service with the French Army in April 1977, while the all-weather Roland II was first fielded by the German Army in 1978 followed by the French Army in 1981. The long delays and ever-increasing costs combined with inflation meant Roland was never procured in the numbers originally anticipated.

Variants
The Roland SAM system was designed to engage enemy air targets flying at speeds of up to Mach 1.3 at altitudes between 20 meters and 5,500 meters with a minimum effective range of 500 meters and a maximum of 6,300 meters. The system can operate in optical or radar mode and can switch between these modes during an engagement. A pulse-doppler search radar with a range of 15–18 km detects the target which can then be tracked either by the tracking radar or an optical tracker. The optical channel would normally be employed only in daylight against very low-level targets or in a heavy jamming environment.

The Roland missile is a two-stage solid propellant unit 2.4 meters long with a weight of 66.5 kg including the 6.5 kg multiple hollow-charge fragmentation warhead which contains 3.5 kg of explosive detonated by impact or proximity fuses. The 65 projectile charges have a lethal radius of 6 meters. Cruising speed is Mach 1.6. The missile is delivered in a sealed container which is also the launch tube. Each launcher carries two launch tubes with 8 more inside the vehicle or shelter with automatic reloading in 10 seconds.

For defense of fixed sites such as airfields the shelter Roland can be integrated in the CORAD (Co-ordinated Roland Air Defense) system which can include a surveillance radar, a Roland Co-ordination Center, 8 Roland fire units and up to 8 guns.

Fire units
  – The initial fair-weather, daylight-only, version used by the French and Spanish armies on the AMX-30R chassis with entry into service in 1976. Roland 1 can also fire the Roland 2 and Roland 3 missiles.
  – This is the all-weather version mounted on the AMX-30R chassis (France and others), the Marder chassis (Germany, FlaRakPz 1, Heer, and others) and also as a shelter mount in either a static location or mounted on a 6×6 or 8×8 all-terrain truck (Germany, Roland FRR, Luftwaffe and Bundesmarine, and others). Euromissile, MaK, IBH and Blohm and Voss of Germany in 1983 proposed the Leopard 1 tank chassis as a carrier for the Roland system to appeal to those countries who already used the Leopard I tank. Roland 2 can also fire the Roland 3 missile.
  – Selected in 1975 as the forward air defense system for U.S. Army divisions, the first missiles were delivered in 1977 with the first firing from the XM975 launcher vehicle (a modified M109 howitzer chassis) taking place in September 1978. (Prior to late 1977 it was planned to use a version of the M520 Goer as the launcher vehicle.) American Roland was essentially Roland 2 with a longer-ranged American-made search radar. The palletized fire unit could be installed and rapidly removed from the XM975 chassis, installed on a truck or used as a static emplacement. Problems with technology transfer and rising costs (ostensibly at least, institutional resistance within the U.S. Army/DOD and Congress to using a 'foreign' weapons system may have actually played more of a role) killed the program and only 27 fire units and 600 missiles were built for one battalion in the Army National Guard, mounted on M812 flatbed trucks. With the failure of the M247 Sergeant York the U.S. Army leased 5 German Roland systems for evaluation as a possible replacement.
  – Paladin was the Hughes/Euromissile submission for the US Army's Line of Sight, Forward-Heavy requirement. It proposed using the XM957 for trials, with production vehicles to use the Bradley chassis.
  – As part of the development process for the Roland 3 missile, Euromissile developed an upgraded launcher with 4 ready to fire missiles.
  – Glaive was a Franco-German programme under which Euromissile would develop a revised Roland fire unit for use with the RM5 missile. This would add an integrated thermal sighting system with laser rangefinder allowing for night/all-weather operation without using the radar. Contracts were issued in 1989 with the system intended to enter service in 1996. However, development of RM5 was cancelled in 1991.
  (upgrade) – This system was an upgrade of existing French Roland 1/2 systems to maintain them in service through 2010. It included fitting the BBKS operator consoles and replacing the existing optical sight with the Glaive thermal imaging unit. France had a requirement to update 54 AMX30-based fire units  and 20 shelter  units  with  this  new  equipment. The upgraded fire unit could use either the existing Roland missile or the new Roland 3 missile.
  – Conversion of existing French Roland 2 systems into a shelter-mounted version of the M3S standard. France procured 20 trailer-borne systems. France intended the shelterised variants for use with air-transported rapid-deployment forces. The upgraded fire unit could use either the existing Roland missile or the new Roland 3 missile.
  – LVB, Luftverlastbarkeit, air-transportable. The Luftwaffe acquired 10 truck-mounted versions, similar to Roland CAROL, with integration into the Heeres Flugabwehr Aufklärungs-und Führungssystem (HFLaAFüSys) air-defence command and control system. As with France, Germany intended the shelterised variants for use with air-transported rapid-deployment forces. The upgraded fire unit could user either the existing Roland missile or the new Roland 3 missile.
  – NDV, NutzungsDauerVerlängert, Extended Service Life. This was a German parallel to the French M3S, being developed by LFK GmbH for the German government. The control system was to be digitized and integrated into the HFLaAFüSys air-defence command and control system, with Roland 3 missile integration. Germany had a requirement to upgrade 84 Army (FlaRakPz 1A2) and 40 Luftwaffe (FlaRakRad) fire units. Trials had been completed in 2003 when Germany decided to withdraw Roland from use.
 Roland M3S (new build) – The prototype for this next-generation Roland system was completed in 1992 and was offered to meet the air defense requirements of Turkey and Thailand. The prototype was a shelter installed on the chassis of the American M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System and featured a then Dassault Electronique Rodeo 4 or a Thomson CSF (now Thales) search radar. Roland M3S can be operated by one man although 2 are necessary for sustained operation and the operator can select radar, TV or optronic (FLIR) tracking. Roland M3S has 4 instead of 2 missile containers in the ready-to-fire position but only the 2 lower positions can be automatically reloaded. In addition to the original Roland missile Roland M3S could use the Roland 3 missile, or the VT1 missile of the Crotale missile system. Additionally the upper launch containers could be replaced by 2 pairs of launchers for the Mistral missile or the standard Roland missile container could be adapted to carry four FIM-92 Stinger missiles to increase the system's ability to rapidly engage multiple targets in a saturation attack.
 / – From 1969 Euromissile studied Roland as a possible naval weapon for shipboard installation. Originally known as Roland MX and later as Jason, the standard twin launcher (without search radar) with two below-decks 8-round reloading drums could be installed on a standard sized module that was featured in several Blohm & Voss MEKO frigate proposals of the 1970s. No prototype or production systems were built with attention turning early on to an abortive vertically launched missile.

Missile variants

 Roland 1/2  The initial missile for the Roland system, entering production in 1977. Roland has a speed of 550 m/s and a range of 6.2 km. Roland 1 and 2 missiles have identical statistics but differ in tracking modes, Roland 1 being optically tracked, while Roland 2 missiles incorporate a continuous wave beacon to allow automatic radar tracking.
   An upgraded missile which entered production in 1988 with speed increased from 550 m/s to 620 m/s and range increased from 6.3 to 8.5 km with maximum effective altitude increased to 6,000 m. Warhead size is also increased to 9.1 kg with 84 hollow-charges. Response time for the first target is quoted as 6–8 seconds with 2–6 seconds for subsequent targets. The Roland 3 missile can be used by all Roland systems.
  ()  This was a joint project between the then Matra and Aerospatiale of France and MBB of Germany begun in 1987 for a missile with increased speed and range. RM5 was designed to achieve speeds of 1,600 m/s (Mach 5.0) with the range increased to 10 km. The RM5 warhead had an 11 kg warhead with dual detonation modes, able to produce either large, high energy fragments for use against armoured targets, or larger numbers of smaller fragments for use against small targets. The companies had committed to only the preliminary design phase and when Germany and France opted not to fund full scale development in 1991 development of RM-5 ceased.
 VT1  In September 1991 Euromissile and the then Thomson CSF (now Thales Group) agreed to integrate the VT1 missile of the Crotale NG system into the Roland 3 system with retrofitting of French and German Roland fire units from 1996. Thales subsequently revoked the Euromissile license, but was ordered to pay Euromissile $109m in a subsequent court case.
  HFK/KV was a BGT proposed alternative to VT1. It was a hypersonic missile with a speed of over Mach 5, intended to reach maximum range of 12 km in only 60% of the time taken by VT1. Guidance was to be inertial with terminal infra-red homing.

Current systems are capable of launching Roland 2, Roland 3 or VT1 missiles. Roland's latest upgraded versions have limited ability to counter incoming low radar cross-section munitions (large-caliber heavyweight rockets).

Carriers

The Roland system has been installed on a variety of platforms, amongst them:

 Tracked
 AMX 30
 Marder
 Wheeled
 ACMAT 6×6
 MAN 6×6, 8×8

Roland 2 was proposed in the early 1980s for installation on the Leopard 1 tank chassis, probably to meet an expected Dutch army requirement but was never built. In configuration it would have been very similar to the AMX-30R.

American Roland on the M109 chassis was built in prototype form but production systems were rather hastily installed on 6×6 flatbed trucks. In the late 1980s there was an attempt to revive the American Roland program with the Paladin submission to the U.S. Army's LOS-F-H (Line Of Sight - Forward - Heavy) battlefield air defense program. This new version of the American Roland system would have used the existing XM975 vehicle for testing & evaluation purposes, with production systems being fitted on a new modified M2 Bradley chassis.

An airliftable shelter named Roland CAROL has also been developed, which is a 7.8t container that can be deployed on the ground to protect fixed assets like airfields or depots or fitted on an ACMAT truck.

Users
 Initial French requirements were for 144 Roland 1 and 70 Roland 2 systems with 10,800 missiles for the French Army, all installed on the AMX-30 tank chassis known as the AMX-30R. 181 systems (83 Roland 1 and 98 Roland 2) were eventually procured. The French Army has subsequently converted 20 of its Roland 2 all-weather systems to the Carole air-mobile shelter mounted system. These are used by the 54th Roland Regiment of the French Reaction Force for rapid deployment on short notice anywhere in the world. Three of the four Artillery Regiments which operated Roland have been disbanded and the 4th (54 Regiment) has been converted to the Mistral (missile). Thus it is likely Roland has been withdrawn from French service.
  was to buy 12,200 missiles and 340 Roland 2 fire units to fully replace the towed Bofors 40 mm guns systems and Contraves Super Fledermaus fire control systems. Eventually 140 fire units installed on the Marder (IFV) chassis were procured for service with the German Army Corps-level air defense and equipped 3 regiments of 36 fire units in 6 batteries of 6 with one regiment assigned to each army corps (I., II., III.) and one battalion of 18 fire units (3 x 6) for the Corps LANDJUT. The Luftwaffe had a requirement for 200 Roland 2 systems for the close-in defense of airfields and as mobile gap-fillers for the MIM-23 HAWK SAM systems. 95 shelter mounted Roland systems (FRR) on MAN 8×8 trucks were eventually procured from the mid-1980s with 27 of those used by US Forces to defend American air bases in Germany. In 1998–99 10 Roland LVB systems were installed on MAN 6×6 trucks to be air-transportable in the Transall C-160 for the German rapid reaction forces. The German Navy also procured 20 FRR truck-mounted shelter systems for defense of naval air bases. Air Force and Navy Roland batteries consisted of 8 FRR fire units and an additional shelter-mounted Fire Direction Centre (FGR) with a TRML-2D radar. In February 2003 the Bundeswehr cancelled a planned upgrade of Roland and announced it would phase-out all of its Roland systems. This was completed by the end of 2005. The Luftwaffe and Navy have also withdrawn Roland and it is no longer employed by Germany. The Army had planned to replace Roland with the new and much more capable development LFK NG, but in 2012 the Army had to hand over the task of Short Range Air Defense to the German Air Force, ending all plans. A battery of shelter-mounted ROLAND FRR systems and a FGR Fire Direction Centre have been passed on to Slovenia.

 On January 9, 1975 the  Army selected Roland 2 as the winner of its SHORADS (Short-Range Air Defense System) competition to replace the MIM-72 Chaparral and M163 VADS divisional air defense systems with a requirement for more than 500 fire units to be designated the MIM-115. Hughes Aircraft and Boeing Aerospace were contracted to develop American Roland which would have been installed in a removable module on the M109 howitzer chassis. The American system used the European fire control system with an American search radar of greater range and enhanced ECCM capability. Initial production of fire units to equip 4 battalions and 1,000 missiles (against an anticipated requirement for 14,000) was approved in October 1978 but subsequently reduced to just 1 battalion. Difficulties in technology transfer, integration and commonality difficulties and rising costs meant only a single Army National Guard battalion (part of the 200th Air Defense Artillery Regiment) was ever equipped with the type, with the 27 launchers and 600 missiles installed on 6×6 flatbed trucks instead of tracked carriers. The XMIM-115 was never type-classified and served for less than a decade, being retired in 1988.
  purchased 4 Roland shelter-mounted systems for static defense of fixed installations and one of these was deployed to defend Stanley airfield during the Falklands War with Britain in 1982. This system fired 8 out of the 10 missiles it was deployed with and is credited with shooting down one Royal Navy Sea Harrier and two  general-purpose bombs (although the British used air burst  bomb in the conflict). This system was captured intact by the British and taken back to Britain.
  purchased 4 Roland 2 systems on the German Marder chassis along with 50 missiles, all of which were retired from service in 2001.

  purchased 6 Roland 2 shelter mounted systems although some sources at the time indicated 8 systems.
  acquired 16 Roland 2 systems on the AMX-30R chassis. An option for a further 16 was not taken up.
  acquired 9 Roland 1 and 9 Roland 2 systems on the AMX-30R chassis and 414 missiles for defense of its armored field formations equipping the 71st Air Defense Regiment. Each battery has 2 Roland 1 and 2 Roland 2 systems with one system of each type held for tests and training.
  is believed to have received 100 shelter-mounted Roland 2 on MAN 8×8 trucks and 13 self-propelled systems on the AMX-30R chassis during the 1980–88 Iran–Iraq War and they first went into action in 1982 claiming a F-4E Phantom and F-5E Tiger that year. Roland is believed to have shot down 2 Panavia Tornado aircraft and an A-6E TRAM Intruder during Operation Desert Storm and an A-10 Thunderbolt during the Iraq War. As a result of Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003 these systems may no longer be in service.
 In 1986  ordered 3 self-propelled Roland 2 systems on the AMX-30R chassis and 6 shelter-mounted systems with deliveries completed in 1989.

Combat use
On 1 June 1982, during the Falklands War, Sea Harrier XZ456 was destroyed south of Stanley, by a Roland launched by members of the Argentine Army's GADA 601 (601st AA Artillery Group). The launcher, one of four examples delivered to Argentina, was later captured in fairly intact condition by the British around Port Stanley after the surrender. It was taken back to Britain as a valuable prize and studied in detail.

At around 11:00PM on the 17th of January, 1991, an A-6E TRAM Intruder from VA-35, AA-510 (BuNo 161668), crewed by Lt. Bob Wetzel and Lt. Jeff Zaun was attacked by two Rolands while attacking the H-3 Airfield in Western Iraq. The Roland didn't set off the American built RWRs, meaning that it was hard to detect. After evading the first Roland, another one (which the crew didn't see), impacted the aircraft. The crew successfully ejected but were soon captured. On 19 January 1991, during the Gulf War a RAF Panavia Tornado GR.1 ZA396/GE, on a SEAD mission against the Iraqi air base at Tallil, was destroyed by a Roland. Both crew members ejected successfully, were taken prisoner and survived the war. The destruction of at least one USAF A-10 Thunderbolt, which occurred at around the same time, was later attributed to a Roland, by the Pentagon.

Rolandgate
In October 2003, controversy erupted between Poland and France when Polish forces from the Multinational force in Iraq found four French Roland surface-to-air missiles. Polish and international press reported that Polish officers claimed these missiles had been manufactured in 2003. France pointed out that it had never sold weapons to Iraq after July 1990 in violation of the embargo. Polish authorities would later remark that the four missiles were manufactured in 1984, and that the 2003 date was the last time when Iraqi personnel had serviced them. Investigations by the Polish authorities came to the conclusion that the persons responsible for the scandal were low level commanders. Wojskowe Służby Informacyjne, the Polish Army's intelligence unit, had not verified their claims before they were leaked to the press. Poland apologized to France for the scandal, but these allegations against France worsened the already somewhat strained relationships between the two countries. The entire incident was sarcastically called "Rolandgate" by the Polish media, using the unofficial naming conventions of US political scandals after Watergate.

Operators

Current operators

Former operators

  - 127 Roland launchers: 13 on AMX-30 chassis and 100 on MAN trucks
  – a number of examples were operated by the Norwegian Army (though the Royal Norwegian Air Force also considered procuring the system in the 1980s for NATO airfield defence) using the M520 Goer as its carrier vehicle (similar to original U.S. deployment plans). All now believed to be retired.
  (sent for destruction in Croatia in November 2016)
  - From 2015 no longer in use
  – formerly used by the U.S. Army National Guard

Gallery

See also
LFK NG, the new short-range surface-to-air missile of the German Army

References

Sources
 Jane's Armour and Artillery 1986–87, pp. 556–558
 Jane's Land Based Air Defense 1993–94, 1999–2000 & 2002–03 editions
 Bill Gunston, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the World's Rockets and Missiles, Salamander Books 1979, pp. 156–158

Self-propelled anti-aircraft weapons
Surface-to-air missiles of the Cold War
Surface-to-air missiles of Germany
Surface-to-air missiles of France
France–Germany military relations
Military equipment introduced in the 1970s

Roland (missile)


For  locks on a river or canal, see Lock (water transport)

A lock keeps things closed. It keeps people from opening something, such as a door or a box. Keys open locks. Sometimes an electronic card or secret numbers will open a lock. The verb to lock means to set the lock so the door or object is closed. A person who works on locks is called a locksmith.

Types of lock mechanisms
A key lock is a lock that uses a key (a piece of metal with teeth like a little saw) to open it. Someone must put the key in the lock and turn it to open the lock. This lock is used in doors and locks for boxes. Key locks can be defeated by picking them.

A combination lock is a lock that uses a dial (a knob with numbers all around it) to open it. Someone must turn the dial to the right numbers in the right order. This is called the "combination." This lock is used on safes and locks for bicycles.

An electronic lock is a special lock that can only be opened with a message from a computer. This message can be stored in a computer chip on a card (called a "key card" or "security card"). Or it can be made by a computer looking at someone's fingerprint or eye.

Time locks are used in banks. They prevent anyone opening the vault until a preset time. This defeats burglary attempts when the bank is closed.

Types of lock
Padlocks are probably the most common type of lock. They are opened either with a key or a combination. The best way to break them is to snap the hoop with a long-handled bolt cutter.

Pin tumbler locks, commonly called 'Yale locks', are very common for fastening doors. They were indeed invented by Linus Yale Jnr in the 1860s.

Deadbolts are locks which cannot be moved to the open position except by rotating the cylinder.

Spring latch lock. The common door latch which locks when you pull the door closed. It is much less secure than a deadbolt lock, but more convenient.

Security
No lock is completely safe, though some are safer than others. Locks can be defeated by brute force or by lock picking. The most common brute force tool is the crowbar, commonly called (UK) a jimmy or jerry or (US) a wrecking bar.

Picking involve tools such as pin-tumbler lock picks, skeleton keys, bump keys, pick guns etc. Carrying these tools, especially after dark, is an arrestable offence in most countries except if the owner is a registered locksmith.

References

Other websites
 The Restoration of Antique Lock and Key by Abha Vardhan (2019)
 Picking Locks Popular Mechanics

Basic English 850 words

Lock