It appears that this subject hasn’t, yet, been brought up here, so

I was watching this great movie, Apollo 13, and I couldn’t help to notice that the ship had some vertical dial instruments which kind of resemble those on pre facelift XJS cars. With the dates in relative proximity, meaning that of the space ship launch (April, 1970) and the Jaguar XJS launch, September, 1975, and with the XJS design stages obviously during the early 70’s, I can’t help it to suspect that there must’ve been some influence from the space ship gauges in the design of the original XJS car gauges. I’m sure that this movie is not necessarily the first time that the interior of the Apollo 13 has been shown on some kind of media since 1970 and somebody in Coventry (perhaps Malcolm Sayer, or?) liked it enough. Then, again, there may be other car designs that used this vertical dials on their instruments back then..



The pre facelift XJS gauges are very similar to the Apollo 13 CO2 pressure gauge shown here, bottom right


The biggest difference between the two is the shape of the gauge pointer

 

I'm just guessing but the "DRUM" gauges are probably less affected by inertia, roll, pitch and yaw.

 

There's also some psychology involved in gauge design based around the mental effort and concentration it takes to interpret the information on gauges.

Drum gauges work well in that respect because the theory is that if all the lines are mid-point horizontal then all is well. You only have to concentrate to fully read the gauge if the needle has moved to a worrying area eg temperature needle in upper part, fuel or oil pressure in lower part etc.

Paul

 

I wonder why those weren't all vertical displays. Four gauges with 8 functions are the standard round dial gauges with dual functions, I almost recognize them as Simmonds Precision (S/P) gauges and I believe some of the probes were also S/P on the Apollo 13, but that was years before I was a west coast rep for S/P. I did know that the fuel indicating system on the Apollo 11 was S/P, but not Apollo 13.

Those gauges have super well balanced meter movements, including the pointer, so displacement or acceleration in any axis shouldn't affect the indication much.
Absolutely, Paul, because at first glance you're not reading any particular system, but rather checking if any system is not where expected, and that is easy to spot. Like the center panel on an aircraft, where the engine gauges are located, the three N1's are in left to right order for eng 1, eng 2, eng 3, etc. Same with N2's, EGT, EPR, etc.

I'll see if I can get other Apollo instruments pics.

 

That was the reason drum gauges were chosen in the XJS. A selling point was made about it at the time the car was launched - which I am more than old enough to vividly remember!.