players in a prolonged war

Hi Davparlr,

>But, these SAM systems would be facing a multitude and massive countermeasures and threats and would have to defeat all of them to be effective.

First, the Allies would be facing a massive SAM threat. And you don't just pull "countermeasures" as a completely functional package out of your magician's hat - you develop them slowly and painfully while you're being shot at (and with more than a remote chance, shot down).

If the Allies would have suffered twice the losses they suffered in early 1944, or three times the losses they suffered in late 1944, they'd probably have had to stop their bombing offensive.

As we have seen, SAMs realistically promised to make the air defense more cost-effective by a factor of one hundred or better.

That means that just to keep their losses down to the maximum ratio that could be accepted without stopping the bombing offensive, the Allied countermeasures would have had to defeat 98 out of 100 SAMs launched.

I think you can assume that both sides were by this time equally adept at Radar and ECM, and that such a degree of superiority on side of the Allied countermeasures was entirely out of the question.

>>Obviously, it would be the Allies who'd have to learn the first lesson ... how to jam SAMs. That's a lesson you can only learn under fire.

>True. But this cycle occurred over and over during the war and losses were incurred and endured.

Well, what would have happened if the German had fielded a month's production of SAMs against targets consisting of large formations of low-flying, slow-flying, big, unmanoeuvrable heavy bombers not equipped with any jamming equipment at all? It would have made Schweinfurt look like a children's birthday party in comparison.

The Allies would have had a hard time learning anything about jamming because they'd not know in advance that electronic surveillance would be imperative on that mission. As the SAMs were largely to rely on existing Flak radar sets, they'd leave a small electronic footprint anyhow.

So even assuming that the Allies realized what the threat was (not a given, since the thought of piloted kamikaze interceptors probably wouldn't be so far off), they'd have to launch another large mission unprepared for jamming just so that they could gather intelligence. (Small raids of course would have been ignored by the SAMs.) The result? Hardly better chances of survival than the first time around, thus the second Schweinfurt-style defeat to SAMs ...

The third big raid might have had to be postponed until jammers were developed (assuming that sufficient electronic intelligence could be gathered). Then the reaid ... and a fair share of SAMs could be jammed. Problem is, with SAM production ramping up and an undisturbed period due to the delay to develop jammers, a much larger number of SAMs in an increased number of position would be ready, killing just as many bombers as before, albeit at a clearly reduced hit chance per missile. Third Schweinfurt in a row.

Fourth big raid ... perfected jammers, Luftwaffe SAMs prove useless.

Fifth big raid ... second type of Luftwaffe SAM with different guidance system unknown to the Allied is fielded in numbers. Jammers are of no use, fourth Schweinfurt.

Sixth and seventh raid ... see second and third.

How many defeats of this kind could the Allies take without having to abandon their bombing offensive? Just a handful would probably have stopped it dead in its tracks.

>But without high speed processors and sophisticated netting, I think the German air defenses by sheer volume and would be overwhelmed as they were in 44-45.

The German air defense system was perfectly capable of tracking the large Viermot raids of 1944 and 1945 just fine, and the mechanical analog computers of the Flak were fully up to the task, too. It was actually shooting down the bombers that posed the problem, and the SAMs were far more accurate than the Flak that did not manage to achieve the high loss rates required to stop the Allied bombing campaign historically.

>I don't have any EMC references, but googling came up with several radar jammers used by the Allies.

Thanks, looks like it was not totally unknown technology like I first thought.

>As for countering chaff, since chaff is a valuable modern technique for defeating radar locks of very powerful radars, I some how doubt that the Germans figured out how to completely defeat it.

Remember that the main use of chaff is to defeat terminal guidance - which might not even have been based on radar in the German SAMs. And again, it comes down to numbers ... could chaff have defeated 98 out of 100 SAMs? I doubt that.

>I have one resource that said that only 25% of the Wasserfalls prototypes got past the crashing stage.

That's the way of rocket development. The V-2 maintained a similar crash rate through 1943 too, but it entered series production in early 1944 anyway - and proved reliable enough in actual operations (even though it did not contribute much towards the war effort).

>None of these would provide a large footprint, if any, above 30k ft.

The limited altitude capability of conventional artillery is another reason that SAMs would have been far more dangerous than Flak ever was, even to more advanced aircraft that might have been fielded in 1946 or later.

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)

Trying to get back to practical issues. A number of assumptions seem to be being made.
1) The number of missiles in the defence
How many missiles would be need to protect Germany. Lets say you have 10000 missiles launchers available, (more I believe than any Army had at any time in the entire cold war in one area).
There must be 200 top priority targets that give you 50 missiles per target, a 50% hit rate (a lot higher than the early SAMs) and you are looking at 25 aircraft shot down.
2) Range of the Missiles
There are going to be huge gaps in your defence, Germany is a big place
3) What about a second raid?
If by some stroke of good fortune the target escapes serious damage and the attackers launch a second raid what have you got left to defend with? Spares are large and will take time to transport.
Its worth remembeing over N Vietnam when defending Hanoi the N Vietmanese ran out of Sam-2 missiles, not because they didn't have them, but because they couldn't transport them to where they were needed in time.
4) Guidance Systems
Even at 180mph bombers are going at 3 miles a minute and will be in range for a limited period of time. You are going to need at least one guidance sysem per 2 missiles thats 5000 systems and you are talking of having duplicate guidance so we are back to 10000 systems

Sorry, but I do not blieve that this is a viable option

Hi Glider,

>There must be 200 top priority targets that give you 50 missiles per target, a 50% hit rate (a lot higher than the early SAMs) and you are looking at 25 aircraft shot down.

Good way of looking at it! Obviously, the Luftwaffe would have to concentrate the SAM positions, following Rommels doctrine of "Klotzen statt Kleckern" ('concentrate, don't spread'), adhered to by Galland's plans for the "Big Blow", too.

Even the original planning yielded only 70 top priority targets, leading to the SAMs being clustered with overlapping range circles and covering ingress and egress routes, so that far more than the SAM positions would actually have been able to engage the raid than just the one at the target.

Selecting a number of for example 10 top priority targets at important points in Germany and providing them with 10% of the SAM strength each would mean 1000 SAMs of the 10000 you suggested available against each raid, or potentially 500 bombers shot down at the 50% kill ratio you suggested. It would probably be less, but the catastrophical losses at Schweinfurt amounted to just 60 bombers ... which should be possible firing 1000 SAMs.

With regard to the time spent in the firing zone, the SAM positions naturally would not be all in the same place exactly at the target. That would reduce the number fired as some would stay out of range, but it would greatly increase the time available for firing at any single bomber that approached the target, bombed, and tried to egress from the target. It's also worth remembering that the bombers were not all be in the same place at the same time either, and for the employment of the SAMs, we really have the time between the lead bomber of the first formation enters the range of the first SAM position on the ingress track, and the time the last bomber of the trailing formation leaves the range of the most outward SAM position on the egress track. That would be long enough for each guidance system to launch multiple missiles so I don't see a significant bottleneck there.

With regard to gaps in the coverage and follow-up raids - I don't think there would be any quick follow-up raid after a massive SAM defense because the Allies would not quickly attack a SAM-defended target again. If they would, and if all SAMs had actually been used up and no new ones delivered yet, the Luftwaffe would be back to the standard means of defense they historically had in 1944 and 1945 - fighters and flak. One raid with 20% losses and one raid with 2% losses still give a combined 11% of losses - still an excessively high figure for a sustained bombing offensive. The same though applies to gaps in the SAM coverage ... it's not necessary to engage every single raid, it's only necessary to shoot down a large number of bombers to make the bombing offensive unsustainable. It's really a game of numbers.

More complex strategies might be developed by both sides after that, and I'm sure that the Allies would continue some kind of air offensive agaist German even after the deployment of SAMs, but I think it likely that massive raids by four-engined heavy bombers would have not played a major role in that air offensive any more.

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)

Regarding the impact of proximity fuzes we can draw comparisons from the US battlefleet in the Pacific theatre using 5"/38 in AA-common(fixed time fuzed) and VT-fuzed (proximity fuze) mode.
In 1944 (with radar controll and RPC) for a whole campaign they expanded

54.200 rounds 5" AA-common and claimed 52 +1 (shared) kills. This translates to an average of 1032 rounds per kill.
During the same campaign it appears that 5" VT have been used, too and 20.075 rounds were expended for 44 +1 (shared) claims, translating to an average of 451 rounds per kill for the 5"/38.

The data derives from the Operations Research Group (ORG) relating to the Philippines 1944 campaign.

During 1945 we have the following datas for carrier task forces supporting the aforementioned numbers:

5"/38 AA-common:--ca. 1000 rounds per claim
5"/38 VT:-----------ca. 420 rounds per claim (adjusted average from kamikaze and non kamikaze actions)

Source: Special Defense Operations Research Group (SpecORG) study, "AA Defense of the Fast Carrier Task Force - 24 October 1944 To 21 March 1945", Anti-Aircraft Study No. 8, revised 11 September 1945.

It has to be underlined that the targets were in all but a very few cases single engined enemy A/C at altitudes well below 10.000ft.
Any meaningful comparison with the 12.8cm FLAK has to take special care of this.
It appears that the use of VT-fuzes improved the effectiveness of the 5"/38 by roughly 60% and there is some reason to expect a comparable degree of improvement if the german 12.8cm FLAK would have fired with VT-fuzes, altough from the data I have seen, VT fuzes are statistically most effective at close distance to targets and at directly converging courses, such as were the case in kamikaze actions. This is not the case in our sceanrio.

One of the first things we would expect to change is that the old 8.8cm FLAK36 would be upgraded to 8.8cm FLAK 41 standarts if the intruding altitudes increase to around 25.000ft.


best regards,
delc

HoHun said:

Hi Glider,

>There must be 200 top priority targets that give you 50 missiles per target, a 50% hit rate (a lot higher than the early SAMs) and you are looking at 25 aircraft shot down.

Good way of looking at it! Obviously, the Luftwaffe would have to concentrate the SAM positions, following Rommels doctrine of "Klotzen statt Kleckern" ('concentrate, don't spread'), adhered to by Galland's plans for the "Big Blow", too.

Even the original planning yielded only 70 top priority targets, leading to the SAMs being clustered with overlapping range circles and covering ingress and egress routes, so that far more than the SAM positions would actually have been able to engage the raid than just the one at the target.

Selecting a number of for example 10 top priority targets at important points in Germany and providing them with 10% of the SAM strength each would mean 1000 SAMs of the 10000 you suggested available against each raid, or potentially 500 bombers shot down at the 50% kill ratio you suggested. It would probably be less, but the catastrophical losses at Schweinfurt amounted to just 60 bombers ... which should be possible firing 1000 SAMs.

Click to expand...

If the original planning was for 70 priority targets I don't know why you have gone down to 10 for your example. If indeed the Germans did concentrate on 10 targets I would simply leave them alone and plaster the other targets.

So for this statement I will go for the 70 targets in the plan. Using the analogy that I mentioned in my posting we will be looking at around 70 losses. Heavy but when onsider that the Germans will have shot their bolt and be wide open to later attacks, a price worth paying.

With regard to the time spent in the firing zone, the SAM positions naturally would not be all in the same place exactly at the target. That would reduce the number fired as some would stay out of range, but it would greatly increase the time available for firing at any single bomber that approached the target, bombed, and tried to egress from the target. It's also worth remembering that the bombers were not all be in the same place at the same time either, and for the employment of the SAMs, we really have the time between the lead bomber of the first formation enters the range of the first SAM position on the ingress track, and the time the last bomber of the trailing formation leaves the range of the most outward SAM position on the egress track. That would be long enough for each guidance system to launch multiple missiles so I don't see a significant bottleneck there.

Click to expand...

Its a good theory but not one that works. Standard practice for the RAF in WW2 was to flood the defences by concentrating on one spot with the maximum number of aircraft in the minimum amount of time. The result would be to swamp a small proportion of the SAM sites.

With regard to gaps in the coverage and follow-up raids - I don't think there would be any quick follow-up raid after a massive SAM defense because the Allies would not quickly attack a SAM-defended target again. If they would, and if all SAMs had actually been used up and no new ones delivered yet, the Luftwaffe would be back to the standard means of defense they historically had in 1944 and 1945 - fighters and flak. One raid with 20% losses and one raid with 2% losses still give a combined 11% of losses - still an excessively high figure for a sustained bombing offensive. The same though applies to gaps in the SAM coverage ... it's not necessary to engage every single raid, it's only necessary to shoot down a large number of bombers to make the bombing offensive unsustainable. It's really a game of numbers.

Click to expand...

I firmly believe that there would be follow up raids and the massive use of decoys. The RAF used a variety of tactics. The most common was to lead the raid with decoys sucking in the defences. After doing this a few times the defences were used to this and sometimes led with the real raid, following up with the decoy.

However you are right, its a game of numbers.

I wasn't able to complete my first e'mail She who must be obayed stepped in. What I was going to do was complete the reasons why 50% is way to high a hit rate.

Issues with German SAMs :-
1 Detonating the missile.
How are the Germans going to detonate their SAM's. It sounds simple but is quite complex. Germany didn't have a proximity fuse so you are left with two options
a) Estimating
This would have to be based on Radar feedback which is even today a difficult task and will have a significant impact on the success rate. No missile that I am aware of has ever relied on this type of detonation.
b) Direct hit
The only missile that has ever used this method is the Rapier and even here the USAF who bought these for airfield defence insisted on a proximity fuse for their missiles

2 Guiding the Missile
Again there are problems.
a) Manual guidance
Obviously impossible at night or if there is any cloud. Even in daylight the glare from the missile tends to blind the person in control to the target.
b) Infra Red
Only short range missiles used this method and the Sun could really spoil the effect. Totally impractical for a long range SAM
c) Radar
Effective but with one major snag. Only one radar could be used at any one time as they would confuse each other due to the limited wavelengths available.

3 Hit Rate
The Sea Dart which was one of the best Naval SAMs in the late 70's was the first to average a 50% hit rate in combat
The Sea Slug which was an exceptional missile for its time (they ran out of targets during development) was considered to be good for a 33% hit rate in combat.
I simply do not see how a 1945/7 missile is going to do better than these missiles. In particular it should be remembered that a Naval missile has some advantages such as the lack of mountains tall buildings and other cover.

What would help is some information about what test results were obtained by the Germans, without that we are guessing.

We also need to remember that the 10,000 figure for the launchers was one that was plucked out of the air and was a lot more than any army had during the cold war. If you have any planned production figures, that would also help.

Hi Glider,

>If the original planning was for 70 priority targets I don't know why you have gone down to 10 for your example.

Because the only thing that matters is the number of losses inflicted to the Allied bomber forces. Inflicting massive losses to the Allied bomber forces are the best way to stop attacks on all targets, so the SAMs have to be deployed to maximize losses.

Obviously, high priority targets also make great bait for bombing raids, but you wouldn't even have to co-locate SAMs and targets. For example, it would make sense to deploy a large number of SAMs around the Buna-Leuna refinery complexes, but also add some along the likely bomber return legs that were usually chosen to avoid known flak concentrations.

These SAM positions would be far off any likely target, but they would still be able to do considerable damage to the returning bombers, increasing the damage done to a single raid over that incurred at the target.

In fact, to achieve the maximum effect from the initial SAM employment, it would probably be good tactics to stage an interception by large fighter forces just outside the target area when the SAMs are first deployed to exploit the havoc wrought by the SAM attacks. Breaking up the formations always made the heavies much more vulnerable, and with losses of the magnitude of the Schweinfurt raids incurred over a rather short period, the formations would probably in a very bad state (if not abandoned altogether).

>Standard practice for the RAF in WW2 was to flood the defences by concentrating on one spot with the maximum number of aircraft in the minimum amount of time.

So how long did a stream of 1000 RAF bombers need to pass a single point on the ground?

>Issues with German SAMs :-

There actually was quite a number of technical solutions for these issues, some of them mentioned in the article I linked above:

http://www.ausairpower.net/DT-MS-1006.pdf

>I simply do not see how a 1945/7 missile is going to do better than these missiles.

Well, the Sea Dart was not fired at formations of Fortresses and Liberators. I'm quite confident that the Sea Dart could have easily exceeded its 50% hit rate against this type of target. As far as can tell, the Sea Dart mostly engaged jets that were either flying very high, or actually skimming the sea very low and very fast to stay out of the Sea Dart's effective envelope - not quite comparable to historic WW2 tactics.

Of course, the deployment of SAMs would have changed WW2 tactics too, but it seems quite likely that the heavy bomber would not have played a major role after SAMs came out.

>If you have any planned production figures, that would also help.

Albert Speer noted that they actually achieved a monthly production output of 900 long-range V-2 rockets, while Kopp quotes the projected Wasserfall price at 7000 - 10000 Reichsmark, and the man-hours at 1/8 of that of the V-2. The potential for the production of several thousands of SAMs per month definitely was there.

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)

Hennig, the link is unfortunately not working for me.
We had a good discussion about SAM back in 2005, with a lot of good arguments put forward by RG Lunatic starting on page 11:
http://www.ww2aircraft.net/forum/aviation/what-plane-do-you-wish-had-sawservice-913-11.html

I made a mistake in lethality approximation of the C2W. It´s 100Kg warhead will cause more blast effects than any naval gun, including Yamato´s 18.1"/45 bombardement rounds and even the unfinished japanese 20"/45 using high explosive rounds (let´s say any naval gun safe a nuclear warhead).
Compared with the US 16"/50 (IOWA-class) and it´s High Capacity projectiles, which were fired off Vietnam into the jungle in order to create helicopter landing sites by deforesting the jungle with blast effects(!), a single C2W warhead will have almost twice these blast effects. This is not mentioned in distance but in force. The fragmentation caused by a large projectile (or for that matter by a GP-bomb) will be carried further with more large fragments, which do enjoi better energy retention than lightweighted fragmentation. Still, the blast effects are much more severe, even if limited in distance. The C2W carried a proximity detonator.

best regards,
Delc.

I'm inclined to believe the German SAM technology was not close to being a.) effective, and b.) operationally deployable in time to present a strategic difficulty before the actual end of the war - so the premise "player in a prolonged war" would not likely be a SAM post D-Day.

The "players" were Me 262 as a long term program that finally achieved operation status in time to severly hurt daylight attacks had it been deployed properly.

Once D-Day phase is over and operational bases on the continent were available, the quantity of Allied Fighters and other shorter range bombers would have the ability to target Posnan to Munich (and Peenemunde).

Had the priorities changed they could have been moved from Tactical to Strategic effort.

Had the Germans accelerated their SAM efforts, I still see nothing in the discussion to claim with proof that the hit ratio would be high... even if deployed by the time the German Chemical and Petroleum industry was totally destroyed. At the end of the day, for the SAM to be a difference maker - it had to be operationally effective before May 1944 and certainly no later than August when REQUIRED petroleum and chemical production levels were unattainable from that point forward.

Even then, I image the first series of tactics by the Allies would be to form 'wild weasal' type units on the deck in front of the primary routes looking for and shooting up the sites as they found them...

I haven't seen any design features of any German SAM (or V-2) that would permit the kind of precision adjustment to adjust to an equally unknown radar target acquisition and tracking (or infrared) device..and certainly the German state of the art for radar was not precision target acquisition and fine tracking/adjustment.

German computer technology in 1945? Soren, are you claiming an on-board device cabable of being slaved to a receiver and control surfaces in a SAM? and used in which a/c in that way?

Where could we see the specs on something like this?

Absent that guidance/control capability, the fall back is to rush into play a proximity fuse and very large payload to generate some success. Call it a fast and big '88'

R4M's should have a better effectiveness based on a spread and much shorter range unless someone can demonstrate otherwise?

Hi Delcyros,

>the link is unfortunately not working for me.

Hm, works for me. Perhaps a momentary glitch?

>We had a good discussion about SAM back in 2005

Ah, interesting! I see we're on the same page regarding the impact of a successful SAM deployment

>The C2W carried a proximity detonator.

Thanks, that's a highly important bit of information!

Do you have a good book on the early SAMs you could recommend?

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)

DerAdlerIstGelandet said:

Thanks for the info. I had allways read and thought the flying wing design was unstable for larger aircraft designs until the advent of fly by wire technology.

Click to expand...

Chris the 'flying wing' concept requires careful design to keep it in reasonable 'pitch stability' profiles.. By definition the CG has to be forward of the Center of Lift so that an increase in AoA, creating more lift, has a tendency to bring the nose back down..

The second issue is that there is, scale wise, less distance to a pitch control surface (like a horizontal stabilizer on a conventional a/c) from the CG to give the pilot more control.. Things like elevons had to have more surface area to achieve enough force over a shorter distance.

The short(er) coupling of the pitch control devices made usually for more difficulty in controling 'porpoising'..

In short - yes the fly by wire made a broader range of design options feasible over the B-35 and B-49.

I read some of the Glenn Edwards accounts in this thread. One speculation I heard from Yeager is that his recollection was that he lost the ship in a pitch up condition and went in an inverted flat spin. I have heard that from at least one other source but I can't remember who

The link finally worked for me so I suggest that everyone has another go. Its interesting and proved me wrong on one important point and that it was my belief that the German didn't have a proximity fuse, my mistake.

However on the other points it doesn't change my views. The radio command link is not going to work well. I have seen these in action on a short range Seacat and the problems I mentioned in my previous posting will kick in.
The manual command link using a transponder and a tracking radar combined with a manual command line of sight has some promise but is complex and will be limited to the frequency's available. This will limit the number of missiles that can be launched at any one time.
The beamrider is seriously advanced for the time and I doubt that it would have been available.
The article describes that last two options as being in development but gives little idea re progress. The emphasis does seem to be on the Radio Command Link for the first deployments.

My preference has always been for the proximity fuse. Its small, light cheap requires no change to the infrastructure, no training and is easily deployed.

One interesting fact in the following post is the improvement the proximity fuze gave to the destruction of the V1 missiles. This went from 4000 rounds per kill to 180.

The German proximity fuse.

One point is the effectiveness of an early SAM against a bomber formation. SAM's are one to one weapons. Multiple targets cause problems and don't make it easier. The reason is the probability of other targets getting in the way causing the tracking radar to break lock.
Its a problem even with todays missiles. During the Falklands a British frigate came within a hairs breadth of being sunk because of this. Two Skyhawks were attacking HMS Broadsword who had both her Sea Wolf missiles locked on to the A4's and were simply waiting for them to come into range. The A4's were jinking like mad and by accident one crossed in front of the other, the missiles lost their lock and the Frigate was defenceless. If its a problem in the 80's with the worlds most sophisticated point defence SAM, we can be sure it would be a problem in the late 40's.

I am still looking into the length of time a 1000 bomber raid would pass through a known choke point, I think it was 40 minutes but will come back when I know.

Hi Glider,

>However on the other points it doesn't change my views. The radio command link is not going to work well.

The key is: SAMs were more cost-efficient than flak by a factor of hundreds. There was plenty of room for a significantly improved system even if a good share of SAMs missed.

Remember, it took 16000 rounds of 88 mm flak to kill one bomber, which cost 4 milllion Reichsmark to produce. Yet it was enough to inflict an average 3 % damage to the bomber formations.

For 7000 RM, the equivalent of one SAM, you could buy just 28 rounds of the 88 mm flak. These 28 rounds gave you a probability of kill of not quite 0.2 percent. That means if one out of 500 missiles fired hits, you have beat flak.

And you just need to beat flak by a factor of five to multiply the American bomber losses by five - that's about 15%, or too much for a sustained bombing campaign. If flak is replaced by SAMs entirely, all you need is a hit percentage of 5 x 0.2 % = 1 % to achieve that.

>One interesting fact in the following post is the improvement the proximity fuze gave to the destruction of the V1 missiles. This went from 4000 rounds per kill to 180.

Hm, actually the post says:

"It was first supplied to Britain to help overcome the V1 cruise missile
fired at London where it in combination with radar and computer
directed guns reduced the mean number of rounds expended to destroy a
V1 from 4000 to 180."

If they had no radar and no "computers" (flak predictors) to begin with, it would be, err, optimistic to attribute all the improvement to the proximity fuse. If that quote refers to heavy flak, they were probably shooting barrage, which obviously is not economic ammunition use. The Luftwaffe had radar and rather good flak predictors, so I guess the benefit of the proximity fuse would have shrunk to something like the American results quoted by Delcyros - an efficiency increase by a mere factor of 2.

>One point is the effectiveness of an early SAM against a bomber formation. SAM's are one to one weapons. Multiple targets cause problems and don't make it easier.

Oh, some of the warheads reportedly were large enough to destroy several aircraft in a formation. Formation flying also limits the capability for evasive manoeuvres. I don't see the B-17s in a formation continuously crossing each other like the A-4's you mentioned. Besides, line-of-sight guidance does not have the problems you quote.

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)

As Delcyros mentioned the 100 kg warhead was quite powerful.

But according to the posted article: later on this was replaced with a 300 kg liquid explosve warhead!



But another thing to consider: though the SAM's would be more cost effective than flack guns (assuming Henning's argument) would this still be better than puting more work into conventional interceptor a/c (piston and jets) and work on better air to air interceptor weapons earlier on and later improvements therof. (including R4M, used both on jest and Fw 190s and such)

Remember unguided interceptor rockets did become the standard interceptor armament for dedicated interceptors in the post war period. (until guided A2A missiles became available)

Hi Koolkitty,

>But another thing to consider: though the SAM's would be more cost effective than flack guns (assuming Henning's argument) would this still be better than puting more work into conventional interceptor a/c (piston and jets) and work on better air to air interceptor weapons earlier on and later improvements therof. (including R4M, used both on jest and Fw 190s and such)

I think you'd need both. A two-pronged approach to air defense is more effective, and less likely to be countered successfully as well.

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)

Glider has posted reference for the proximity fuse, thanks my friend!
I could add R. Lusar, but his book (Die dt. Waffen und Geheimwaffen im 2. Weltkrieg und ihre Weiterentwicklungen) is nothing I could recommend. He has some notable informations on proximity fuses augmenting the post referred to by Glider.

The link does work for me now and I am really surprised to see the warhead beeing replaced by 300 Kg. This warhead (compare: an 1.102 lbs SC 500 bomb does only has 270 Kg high explosives) should be able to cause sufficiant blast effects in high altitude and corresponding low air density to wipe out a densely packed subformations of bombers. That´s terrible.
An SC-500 at sea level has an effective splinter radius of 95m (~315ft.) and a destruction diameter of 26m (86ft.), at which it will form a caldera out of solid earth. At 20.000 ft. with 300 Kg high explosives this would translate to a mere destruction diameter of 37.14m (123ft.). If the point of detonation is 60ft. away from a bomber, the blast effects may destroy the bomber with severe damage followed in within a distance in excess of 400 ft.


I think the larger warhead was specifically mentioned for killing multiple bombers at once much like the even larger and more powerful Enzian warhead (which is comparable only to the 2.204 lbs SC 1000).

Hi Delcyros,

>The link does work for me now and I am really surprised to see the warhead beeing replaced by 300 Kg.

Hm, Kopp's article seems interesting enough, but I'm not sure how accurate it is the details. As always, it might be better to cross-check with other sources.

Juts to get an impresion, what was the warhead weight of the V-2?

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)

HoHun said:

Hi Delcyros,

>The link does work for me now and I am really surprised to see the warhead beeing replaced by 300 Kg.

Hm, Kopp's article seems interesting enough, but I'm not sure how accurate it is the details. As always, it might be better to cross-check with other sources.

Juts to get an impresion, what was the warhead weight of the V-2?

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)

Click to expand...

You are right, it´s better to be careful and rate this as unprooven until better information / cross reference becomes avaiable.

The V-2 military warhead is composed of 975 Kg, altough a more stable charge is used than those in use of AAA and SAM. (Nowarra, Luftrüstung, vol. 4, p-61)

For an simple interim fix, while guidance systems were being perfected, would something like the unguided Taifun series rockets have been effective? I think they were ready by the end of the war, but never had the chance to become operational. They were to be launched in salvoes at the masses of bombers. They travelled at mach 3+ and could reach an altitude of 12km. The launch system was put on a 88 mm gun mounting which would make it mobile for a wide dispersement.

I think the US used the idea as the Loki rockets after the war.

I think the 300 kg liquid explosive warhead was also for accuracy problems. (assuming this is accurate)



Also, how much do you guys think the proximity fuse would have helped the R4M?


And which of the SAM projects do you think had the most promise or were the most realistic/practical?

kool kitty89 said:

Also, how much do you guys think the proximity fuse would have helped the R4M?


And which of the SAM projects do you think had the most promise or were the most realistic/practical?

Click to expand...

From my understanding the R4M already carried a proximity fuze. If this is correct and I am not wrong here, this might be a reasonable explenation for it´s success. The "Annäherungszünder" is mentioned by both, Lusar and Nowarra in context with R4M without giving any details. It could be interesting to hear Erichs comments on this, whether this is true or not.

The most practical SAM solutions would have been the C2W Wasserfall and the Hs-Schmetterling , mostly because they had been developed to the point of technical feasability and operational testings.
The other SAM projects did not receive such a high degree of maturity and remained mostly prototypes in different stages of development.