Ad: This forum contains affiliate links to products on Amazon and eBay. More information in Terms and rules
The LW most certainly had the combat experience but "radio navigation/bombing aids" didn't vary much between combatants.
The Germans were the only ones with this sort of stuff. It gave them a technological edge over contemporaries. No other bomber force in the world in 1940 had anything similar.
Battle of the Beams - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It's an ADF unit.
It might not have been, but its application was enough to cause the British intelligence community and even Churchill himself many anxious nights attempting to figure out how it worked. At the time there was quite a crisis over its discovery.it wasn't a great breakthrough in technology
this source is sure best of mine Aircraft Database
The Brits bombed from 30k, not that they could hit anything, but, they could carry a bomb load up there.And service ceiling with a full bomb load was????
The Brits bombed from 30k, not that they could hit anything, but, they could carry a bomb load up there.
Lorenz was a blind landing aid, yes and you're right in everything you state there Joe, but no other country was employing the technology to guide bombers to their targets in the same manner in 1940. In this the LW was unique and also the most accurate at finding their way to the target area. X- and Y-Gerat however, applied a different principle to Knickebein based on Lorenz and used higher frequencies and were more sophisticated. Here's a description of how X-Gerat worked by R.V. Jones, involved in determining German technological breakthroughs with British Scientific Intelligence:
"In principle, the aircraft had to fly along a beam that was laid directly over the target(the director beam) and release its bombs at a point rather short of the target. The information needed to compute the release point involved the height and speed of the aircraft and where it was at any instant relative to the target and the type of bombs. The way this information was derived in the X-beam system was to lay two beams across the director beam, crossing it at pre-determined distances before the target. In general, one, the main signal crossed the director beam five kilometres before the target and the other, the fore signal at twenty kilometres.
While the pilot flew along the director beam, either by listening to it or watching a direction indicator, the bomb aimer listened for the cross beams. The time interval between crossing the two beams would be the time taken to cover fifteen kilometres, which gave the aircraft's speed and the main signal also told him that he was five kilometres away. The problem of determining the release point was simplified by a small mechanical computer involving a stop clock that was started by the bomb aimer as he crossed the fore signal and stopped as he crossed the main signal; and then, if he had fed in the correct height information from his altimeter, the mechanism would work out by itself when the bombs ought to be released."
It might not have been, but its application was enough to cause the British intelligence community and even Churchill himself many anxious nights attempting to figure out how it worked. At the time there was quite a crisis over its discovery.
But they learned, very quickly, not to do so, since the contrails, even at night, gave the fighters a white finger, pointing straight to each aircraft. That was why they dropped their operational altitude, to keep out of the contrail band, not because of any inability to fly that high.The Brits bombed from 30k, not that they could hit anything, but, they could carry a bomb load up there.
the same thing could have been done with 2 ADF units crossfixing in the same manner used.
Although I doubt it's better than the B-17B/C, I wonder where the SM.79 Sparviero would fit into this discussion. Fast for a bomber in 1940, torpedo capable, already had a proven record coming into WWII, and didn't suffer for armament by early war standards (though the lack of turrets was a pretty big handicap).
Most likely. You don't want to have armed bombs in your bomb bay while you are diving more or less straight down - if one breaks loose it may hit your aircraft and you're gone. Even if you're able to release them from the bomb bay, this would have to be done while pulling up and the forces may jam the bombs in the bay and accuracy would not really be good.Would that imply that dive bombing was possible only with externally mounted bombs?