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Didn't the Z battery projectiles also form the basis for the later aircraft mounted 25 and 60lb PRs that were so instrumental later against submarines, shipping and for ground attack?Z Battery 'non rotating projectiles' did go on to form the chassis of post war AC sports cars. Just as Morrison shelters became Cooper racing car chassis with brake drums made of surplus ship engine cylinder liners. Good steel was at a premium in post war Britain. Hence Land Rovers came with aluminium bodywork not steel. But I digress from the OP.
The Smith Gun, Northover projector and Blacker Bombard were IIRC only ever issued to The Home Guard, and never actually deployed in action, let alone with the regular army (except possibly for some early war exercises).British gave up fairly quickly on AA rockets and for an army that hung onto the Smith gun, the Northover projector and the Blacker bombard that may tell us something.
Turns out they gave rockets to the Home GuardThe Smith Gun, Northover projector and Blacker Bombard were IIRC only ever issued to The Home Guard, and never actually deployed in action, let alone with the regular army (except possibly for some early war exercises).
The Blacker Bombard was not just for the Home Guard but was issued to the Regular army and served in action in North Africa. Post Dunkirk it was also issued to Regular infantry in Britain until they could make enough anti tank guns for them.The Smith Gun, Northover projector and Blacker Bombard were IIRC only ever issued to The Home Guard, and never actually deployed in action, let alone with the regular army (except possibly for some early war exercises).
The main impetus behind these rocket (and/or black powder propelled) weapons was to get something/anything into production at a time when invasion looked like a real threat. By the time that has passed by '41, all the best weaponry was clearly going to be needed in theatres like North Africa and beyond. So all the Heath Robinson stuff stayed at home for the Old Boys to exercise and drill with.
I believe that the Northover projector was actually credited with a kill when fired from a trawler and managed to knock down an HE111! Joking aside, given it used next to no resources of any significance and the ships own steam lines for its propellant, I think it was a rather cunning invention. More recently, I wondered if they shouldn't have dusted off something similar as an anti-pirate weapon firing internationally 'plausibly deniable' ammo like bowling balls at the Go-Fasts off the Horn of Africa!
Ah, the infamous Flame Fougasse! Weirdly, one thing we were never short of in wartime were petrol reserves.Another occasional find is a group of rusted out oil drums in the undergrowth by a dip in the road which were filled with petrol and a throwing/igniting charge to toss them flaming into a movement restricted area like a sunken road and ruin an enemy's day and do no good at all to any transport.
They had different mechanisms of damage. The blast damage scales very poorly with distance compared to fragments.A 10.5cm shell held 1.5kg of explosive and about 5.6kg of propellent but used a crap load of steel. That 500kg charge in the rocket is 333time more expensive in explosive.
This reasoning has wrong assumptions - that the primary purpose of AA artillery was to destroy aircraft. In fact, the primary purpose of artillery was to reduce the effectiveness of air raids by frightening crews and raising the altitude of bombing.Germans were using obscene amounts of war material just to kill one bomber, or to damage a few.
In the case of Poland, the most obvious alternative is to improve decision-making and introduce more 40 mm Bofors guns into production earlier. Additionally, the Polsten gun should have been introduced before the war.
As for heavy anti-aircraft artillery, the 75 mm gun should have been abandoned and a 105 mm heavy gun should have been created instead, which could provide better protection against high-altitude bombing of cities.
Practice has shown that medium-caliber artillery is completely sufficient for front-line units, which makes the mobility of heavier artillery irrelevant.
If I had to improve something in this warhead, i would experiment with fuel-air explosion, using coal dust.
Even if the resulting explosion was not stronger, it would be many times cheaper.
The final idea is to create a 5 cm smoothbore gun that would fire aerodynamically stabilized shells at very high speed using very long barrels (~1300 m/s). Such a gun would fill the gap between 37 mm and 88 mm guns.
That's right, which answers your previous question - the 75 mm caliber was considered too weak even before the war.Many armies fielded heavy AA guns somewhere in the range of 90mm, which seem to have been about the largest size gun that was still decently road mobile.
The velocity of the fragments after the explosion is much higher and can be directed sideways, which can positively use the speed of the projectile. But this is uncharted territory - blast warheads scale their effect poorly with distance and have lost their effectiveness abruptly against structurally stronger supersonic aircraft.Hmm, I'm not sure a fuel-air explosion works for AA. Getting the fuel to mix properly with air when the bursting charge of the supersonic rocket/shell cracks it open sounds like a non-trivial problem.
This was not so much filling the gap between 37 and 88mm, as something envisioned to be a better heavy AA providing improved kill probability against Allied heavy bombers
I do not like sabots for AA - just make longer barrels!As I pointed out back on page 1 of this thread, they had something like this in prototype stage. A 88mm smoothbore gun firing fin stabilized saboted shells (about 50-60mm diameter?) at high velocity and equipped with an impact fuse.
My idea was to make a cost efficient gap filler.This was not so much filling the gap between 37 and 88mm, as something envisioned to be a better heavy AA providing improved kill probability against Allied heavy bombers.
Could bomb from 8km is a lot different than did bomb at 8km. Most B-17s did NOT bomb at 8km. Most He 111s didn't fly at 8km until the bombs were gone and around 1/2 the fuel was used up. Do 17z had service ceiling of about 7000 meters at normal max load. Bombers could not fly at service ceiling altitude and say in formation. TO stay in information planes had to fly 1-2km lower than their service ceilings.The Germans bombed from an altitude of over 8 km, which would have left practically no room for horizontal fire maneuvers. Ju-86P with an altitude of 12 km were in preparation. That's why I propose to skip the 90 mm caliber.
The two can share some production facilities, tooling.An additional advantage is the fact that the 105 mm can share the production of ammunition with 105 mm field guns.
In order to increase hit probability from 88 mm guns i have cluster loads
How? The most obvious solution is to have 3 sub-shells in the common "sabot"!The main problem with using an 88mm cluster load is that you would only be able to have 2(?) sub-munitions of usable size.
After thinking it over, I decided that the best solution would be a segmented design similar to that used in the SALVO program.A second problem is that the round will be lighter (both in mass and in structure)
A third problem is cost - ie what would be the monetary cost in terms of personnel and materiel, and the logistics costs of man hours and supply/number or rounds required, of the AA cluster round vs a conventional AA round vs the % chance of a hit.
And reusability. A reusable Taifun with a parachute that only needs to be refueled before the next use could reduce the cost of air defense by a factor of at least 5x - assuming free collection of missiles by civilians.Rockets, on the other hand, lend themselves to cluster munitions.
Some self-propelled options:
- twin 20mm or one 25mm or one 30mm on the Wespe base (obviously, without that tall superstructure)
- 4x 20mm, 2x 30mm or 1x 37mm on the StuG-III base
- twin 20mm on a truck for basically any country
- Soviets actually producing the light tank with the twin HMG for AA work
- one 25mm or twin 20mm on the Lorraine 37 tractor
A good 75mm AA gun on the truck or on another vehicle (half-track or a fully-tracked vehicle) would've probably also came in handy, and easier to do than with the 85mm and bigger guns. Also useful for anti-tank work, as well as, need-be, 'normal' artillery piece.
Probably the best of that lot were the Hungarian Nimrod, as well as the British Crusader AA tank, both with 40mm Bofors as the business end.
The Hetzer was 50cm wider than that of the Pz-38(t)and it was also considerably heavier.No idea how that was planned to work, it was apparently already difficult to fit the Kugelblitz turret on the Pz IV chassis, and the Pz 38 chassis is a lot smaller still. Perhaps it was some kind of reduced size variant of the Kugelblitz turret?
Indeed, interesting! However, to achieve the primary objective, there has to be a provable, viable threat - and that means aircrew *knowing* that a squadron mate has not come back, or has experienced having their own aircraft hit by flak. And that means matching improvements in aircraft performance with improved accuracy, destructive power, and range in the artillery firing at them.This reasoning has wrong assumptions - that the primary purpose of AA artillery was to destroy aircraft. In fact, the primary purpose of artillery was to reduce the effectiveness of air raids by frightening crews and raising the altitude of bombing.
This is the main strategic strategic goal in worsening the enemy's cost-to-effect ratio. Increasing aircraft losses is a secondary effect and requires disproportionate resources to the primary effect - in this respect, fighters work better.