Oh, yes. In practical terms things really worked out quite well. As I stated, "Semi-empirical methods certainly worked well enough, but most ballisticians considered these methods somewhat 'impure' theoretically." It's always possible to construct a good range table by simply graphing angle of departure vs range, and this was often what was actually done. The difficulty lies in computing what are best called 'differential effects', i.e. the effect on range of a 2% change in propellant temperature, for example. One can't really determine all of these changes via range firings, so one must resort to theory to fill in the gaps and determine what the corrections were. That's where things got a bit fudgy, because the ballisticians were, at that time, extending themselves a bit into unknown territory, i.e. highly curved trajectories at low air densities, and they had not yet developed a large database to work from.
Bill Jurens