Zabudskii, Nikolai

Born 1863; died Feb. 27 (Mar. 12), 1917, in Petrograd. Russian artillerist, exterior an interior ballistics scientist, lieutenant general.

Zabudskii graduated from the mikhail Artillery College in 1872 and from the Mikhail Artillery Academy in 1877. In 1880 he defended his master’s thesis and became a lecturer for the subdepartment of ballistics at the academy. In 1890 he became a professor and in 1900, professor emeritus. From 1879, Zabudskii worked for the Committee on Artillery; in 1902 he became head of the Commission for Testing New Artillery Systems.

In 1894, Zabudskii proposed an analytical solution of the problem of the influence of the earth’s rotation on the flight of a projectile. In 1895, using the results of experiments by N. V. Maievskii and later experiments, he deduced a new resistance law—the Maievskii-Zabudskii law of 1895. Zabudskii’s works Exterior Ballistics (1895) and Theory of Probability and its Application to Firing and Adjustment Fire (1898) were of great importance for artillery science. In 1911, in recognition of his work in exterior ballistics, Zabudskii was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of France. In 1914 he published a treatise on the experimental determination of pressure curves and velocity curves as functions of the path of a projectile in the bore of a gun.