Look, the British used a repeater kind of telegraphic system that transmitted data to the men at the gun positions who matched their own dial settings off transmitted data they read off master dials and shot. The US system was direct control in that the settings were fed directly to the servo motors with the men and a fire control computer slaved to the local gun-house rangefinder in the main armament gun-house there as backup in case the servos lost direct input feed from the main fire director. THAT is what the article states and what actually was. The other thing is that the British persisted in keeping long base length rangefinders at the gun houses and used shorter lengthed ones in their fire control director positions (less weight high up in the ship.). That induces inaccuracy at long ranges in their directors because their angle solutions were 'coarser" at their high mounted short base length directors. I understand that ranging positive control as a cybernetic system is poorly explained in the article but I think I gave it to you in plain English. Voice piping is not as stupid as it sounds either, because if the telegraphic transmission of data from the British system failed then telephonic, voice pipe and messenger runner if it came to it, still keeps the data flowing and the guns working. Let's not claim that it was not a thing. Local control was a very important aspect of British method because they expected their primary and secondary data telegraphic transmission from directors to guns aimer positions to fail during battle. It was a redundancy they learned from experience. Was it inferior to do things the way they did? No, absolutely not. Not if you expect Jutland again. But if you are fighting an enemy like the USN in the north Atlantic, it could be "problematic". during the mid battle ranges when their directors with 2 d stabilization give better angle solutions than yours. Belt punching range in a night gun fight? British system is actually "better".
That is essentially Friedman by the way. (^^^)
No need to be defensive. I have no issue with anything you have said.
I was pointing out, shall we say 'factual minimalism', in the article you originally quoted. Many of it's points are indeed quite fair and accurate, but it misses quite a lot of vital detail, such as what you have said above.
My suspicions are further aroused by the phrase in the article:
'for a living, I design process control computers that do this digitally. So, please trust me on this, I'm amazed at what was achieved in closed-loop systems using 1930s analog computers'.
That may be true, but if he really does and has a solid engineering grounding, he would know that control theory and the related disciplines all originated in the 1930s on analog systems, and that those systems have a history that stretches well into the '80s.
It's a pop-sci article, so perhaps I'm being too harsh ... or perhaps I just have an aversion to people who say 'trust me on this'.
(and you can trust me on that)