AA guns + rockets alternatives for 1935-45 (1 Viewer)

[SplitRz]

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.

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?

[edit!] Yes! it seems they did. So very much not entirely wasted - Z-battery - RP-3

Sadly, Z Battery operation possibly killed more British civilians than German aircrew. A Z Battery was infamous for being the cause of this horrific disaster: The Bethnal Green Tube Disaster

 

[SplitRz]

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.

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!

 

[Shortround6]

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).

Turns out they gave rockets to the Home Guard

There was a single launcher with around 1000 made by Sept 1940
Most went to Merchant Navy.

 

[yulzari]

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!

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.

It was the foundation of the very successful naval Hedgehog spigot mortar which allows ASW vessels to fire forwards when approaching an asdic contact. Equally the proven spigot mortar Bombard was a model for the later PIAT infantry man portable anti tank weapon.

One finds Blacker Bombard Home Guard weapon pits filled in post war all over Britain, especially in the south and east. Built to a standard pattern in concrete with a central weapon pin swivel post and protected reload. In a suitable position they can dominate any target within their range which would be exceeding displeased with receiving a substantial HE round landing on them. Ideally placed where they can be covered by small arms fire to keep enemy infantry at a distance. Especially used in suburban situations with the petrol fougasse being more popular in rural areas. My grandfather's village had a large Canadian Pipe Mine/s in the road behind the village. Stayed there until the war was over. Always fun as laid full of an explosive liable to deterioration that sometimes needed to be emptied when found unstable and refilled. Still occasionally found when digging works and some are still full of that potentially unstable explosive. 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.

https://zeticauxo.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/pipe-mines.pdf

Thousands of These Mortars Dotted the British Countryside For An Invasion That Never Came

Worst. Mortar. Ever.

www.historynet.com

Hedgehog (weapon) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk_vS-VdYas&t=117s

Flame fougasse - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[SplitRz]

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.

Ah, the infamous Flame Fougasse! Weirdly, one thing we were never short of in wartime were petrol reserves.

Another still fairly regular find in attics and old sheds are stores of Northover Projector / improvised grenade 'incendiary projectiles' - basically a stoppered bottle of petrol containing a lump of phosphorous. Something to be dropped onto a hard surface or uncorked out of curiosity at your peril!

 

[peceed]

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.

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.

They had different mechanisms of damage. The blast damage scales very poorly with distance compared to fragments.
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.

Germans were using obscene amounts of war material just to kill one bomber, or to damage a few.

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.

The Germans would have been helped the most by a proximity fuse, but in the absence of one I once developed alternative concepts for increasing the effectiveness of AA artillery.
It is known that at some point the use of impact fuses instead of time fuses increased the effectiveness of German artillery by a factor of 3x. In that case, however, the shells were too large, giving a huge overkill. So I decided to create cluster ammunition with impact sub-shells, separated by a time fuse. The simplest solution seems to be standard tubes with a diameter of about 4 cm, creating bundles composed of 3, 4 and 7 elements for shells of calibres 88, 105 and 128 mm, weighing 2.5 kg and containing 400 grams of hexogen (guaranteeing the downing of the aircraft).
Another, even more hardcore solution is to recover shells that have not hit using bright parachutes (a mechanism designed in such a way that opening the parachute requires unscrewing the fuse.
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.

 

[tomo pauk]

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.

 

[z42]

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.

Were the LW bombers flying above the ceiling of 75mm AA guns early in the war?

Practice has shown that medium-caliber artillery is completely sufficient for front-line units, which makes the mobility of heavier artillery irrelevant.

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. Or do you mean medium caliber as something like the 40mm?

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.

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.

But for a somewhat less ambitious attempt, they could have increased the ammonium nitrate content in their amatol mixture? Even at a 20/80 AN/TNT mixture it has about 2/3 the power of pure TNT, and a lot 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.

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. 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.