Zyzygie’s Mumbles and Rambles

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soulezoo said:
It's hard to tell for me, but that appears to be a B-26... if so, then it wins hands down for both altitude and combat radius!!
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The problem with joke articles is that people do take them seriously, I remember explaining why a bomber cannot fly to the moon when that was published.
 
stona said:
It is often ignored that this requirement did not just pertain to the Me 262.
Cheers
Steve
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I was not ignoring that, there was a requirement for the Spitfire and Hurricane to be day and night fighters tat does not mean that Spitfires should have been sent up at night regardless of their chance of success in battle or crashing on landing.
 


The Jumo 004B4 required just under 800 man hours to build, which is actually less than a piston engine. It took about 8 man hours to remove and replace both the Engines on an Me 262. Each engine could be refurbished about 4 times with 150 indirect hours in parts and Labour each time. Roughly 100 hours of flight time required 1500 hours of labour i.e. 15 hours per flight hour. I doubt an engine would last that long before combat or other damage. These numbers almost certainly would have to improved but they compare favourably with piston engines. So long as the engine could be made dependable over its 25 hour interval the numbers are ok.

It sometimes takes time for little things to grow into big things. Me 262 with toss bombing sights and cluster bombs would make a plausible tank killer. That's what NATO planed to use post war.

The Me 262 could carry 24 5.5cm. R4M rockets intended for air to air use and a variant of this fitted with an improved version of the 3.5 inch 88mm panzershrek "bazooka" could also in theory be carried. They were known as panzerblitz-II. The Germans were first exposed to air launched rockets when the Soviets used them but seemed to dismiss them unlike the British who sought Soviet advice to develop theirs. The Germans used guns, cluster bombs or generally simply slid a bomb into the enemy tank with a time delay fuse by flying a Fw 190 over the tank. It was an accurate method.

The dispersion of these rockets produces an CEP of 8m radius at 1000m. If you launch 8 rockets only 4 will be within a 8m radius subtending an area of 200sq meters. Imagine trying to hit a shipping container of say 6m x 2.2 (area about 15 sq meters. The probability is only 7.5% for a hit for one rocket and about 26.8% that one of the 4 will hit. In practice the hit rates were maybe 20-100 times worse.

By trebling the number of rockets fired the Germans roughly trembled their chance of a hit, although with a smaller warhead, theoretically to 85% with 24 rockets. Obviously worse in real life.

The Luftwaffe became interested in larger air launched rockets only because of the stand off ranges that became neccesary due to improving AAA. Those rockets, which never saw service, look like copies of the Soviet ones. They differed in having hollow charge cluster submunitions. 7 for the smaller rocket and 22 for the larger. There is a photo in Fleischers German air dropped weapons.

The Me 262 was a completely new system. It needed toss bombing bomb sights, lead computing gyro sights with radar ranging built in FuG 248, probably Revolver guns. Without these the speed was almost unusable in attack.

The purpose of tank killing is less about attrition than about delaying a tank breakthrough long enough for ground forces to plug the breech.
 
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Thinking of military aircraft in terms of what it actually hit as to its military effectiveness is a dumb idea, and a total misunderstanding about how airpower effectiveness should be measured. This whole argument goes to whether airpower alone can win wars on its own.


Facts are that airpower alone cannot win wars, and the casualties caused by airpower alone are fairly minimal. Despite all the effort poured into the allied air campaign, whether strategic or tactical 9ie over France), even under the most optimistic estimates, airpower might account for 5-10% of total battle casualties and maybe 20-30% of strategic war making capacity. On the face of it, airpower could be argued as a lost cause.


Yet anyone who argued along those lines would be sadly misinformed. There has not been a single war won by a modern western style army since 1918 without the control of the air being in the possession of that winning side. For both sides in WWII, from Poland through to the fall of Berlin, every side on the receiving end of an airpower campaign would comment on its effects. We can talk about the strategic wars separately, buyt in terms of battlefield experiences, there is no doubt that air power was a decisive force multiplier to the side that possessed air superiority. This is regardless of whether the aircraft could hit anything or not.


Dupuy has done the most work on this subject, and just operating from memory, his studies, as I recall, suggest that the combat multipliers are massively affected . Dupuy uses an index based on the "typical German field division of 1943. Such a division is assigned a value of 100. A 1942 Allied infantry division without effective airpower was calculated by Dupuy, whilst operating in Europe in temperate conditions to have a rating of 260 if air superiority was not present, and 135 if supported by air supariosity. 260, means that in order to do the same thing as the 100 rated german formation, you would need 260 allied ground troops to do the same job. With airpower supporting, these same troops had significantly closed the gap. In 1944, allied effectiveness without airpower had basically just about caught up with the Germans without air support and by late 1944, were ahead of them.


The reason it can be argued the me 262 was not effective as a fighter bomber, has nothing to do with the aircraft or accuracy at all. My opinion is that the 262 was as accurate as any fighter bomber. The real issue leading to the calim it was ineffective relates to the german loss of air superiority. Pinprick attacks here and there is not going to slow down or downgrade allied performance on the ground as much as putting the 2622 over the heads of the germans to put a roof over their heads.


And before anyone starts spruiking about the effectiveness of Ju-87s, they too were not immune to this cold reality. After Kursk, the heavily outnumbered stukas on the eastern front were largely irrelevant to the outcomes of battles. That doesn't make them a bad bomber. Its just that the measure of aircraft effectives is as much linked to the air state, as anything.
 
Without new launch racks the number of anti-tank R4Ms goes way down.



Possible rack for the anti-tank rockets?

I would note that a steady gun platform (no snaking or porpoising) was desired for ground attack along with good aileron control. High role rate wasn't needed so much as quick response (although they often go together) and a fairly light effort on the stick to make corrections in aim without over correcting.
Obviously you use what you have but some minor things explain why some planes were favored over others.
 
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Parsifal makes some good points. Ground attack was found to be effective, a reason that it continuous today. Not even the most rabid flyboys could keep it going for almost 80 years if it didn't work.

BUT the ground attack aircraft have to be survivable. That is to say have acceptable losses per mission. You can have the most accurate aircraft/bomb in the world but if the enemy air defense shoots down large numbers of the attack aircraft every time they flew it is a loosing game very quickly. See JU 87 over Britain in 1940.
Replaced by Bf 109 and Bf 110 fighter bombers. Less accurate but much more survivable in hostile airspace. And still accurate enough to get the job down most of the time.

For the Germans in 1944 it is a question of using the 262s in pinprick attacks or blunting the Allied air attacks, and this may not have been a good idea either as it brings the 262 down to low level. While still fast it doesn't climb as well as some of the piston engine fighters and if flying at low level it can be bounced from above.
 
pbehn said:
I was not ignoring that, there was a requirement for the Spitfire and Hurricane to be day and night fighters tat does not mean that Spitfires should have been sent up at night regardless of their chance of success in battle or crashing on landing.
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The British didn't use the Spitfire as a night fighter for many reasons, not least its importance as the best day fighter available in 1940/41. Why waste time training the pilots of your best day time aircraft to operate at night? Defiant crews had already been doing so even before the BoB, and the Hurrricane was verging on obsolescence as a front line day fighter in 1941. These other types, like the Defiant and Hurricane, were used in that role despite the limited chances of success and risks. This was a perfectly rational decision.The British did not have their backs to the wall facing the night time Luftwaffe bombing in the same way as the Germans did facing the Anglo-American offensives after D-Day and the Soviet advances in the east. Desperation can lead to attempts at radical solutions (just look at the 'natter') and that is why all German fighters were required to be capable of operating as fighter bombers. The reasons none were effective have little to do with the aircraft per se and much to do with the way they were used. An Me 262 or Fw 190 could have been just as effective as a Typhoon or P-47, just as the Bf 109 could have been as effective as the Spitfire in this role.
Cheers
Steve
 
Uh Oh... just lucky there was a spare strip.

Vampire Rips up runway at Halfpenny Green
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX3_mQZ4gY8


The ME 262 also had to have special concrete surfaces because of the closeness of the engines to the ground:

"The Me-262 was highly vulnerable on takeoff and landing, since the JUMO engines took a long time to throttle up; since the engines tended to set asphalt runways on fire, the Me-262 was restricted to operations at airfields with concrete runways, which were more easily targeted by the Allies than dispersed dirt airfields. On 7 October two were shot down on takeoff by Lieutenant Urban L. Drew of the USAAF, flying a P-51 Mustang. The Luftwaffe eventually assigned FW-190s, when they were available and had fuel, to fly air patrols around the air bases to protect the Me-262s, and the airfields were ringed by heavy flak defenses. The flak installations were a mixed blessing, however, since they were often staffed by poorly-trained and nervous troops who were just as likely to fire on friends as foes..."

The Messerschmitt Me-262 Schwalbe / Sturmvogel
 
I doubt an engine would last that long before combat or other damage. These numbers almost certainly would have to improved but they compare favourably with piston engines.
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The 8th AF changed the engines out of their bombers and fighters after every second long range mission?
 

This is the whole sorry Vampire incident story:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90KOh_0wPOs
 
One thing to remember is that some of those technology transfers were agreed when the length and outcome of the war against the nazis was more in doubt. I don't know if jets were one of the items on the list.
 
swampyankee said:
One thing to remember is that some of those technology transfers were agreed when the length and outcome of the war against the nazis was more in doubt. I don't know if jets were one of the items on the list.
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Jet transfer was post war....when we needed the money. 25 Rolls-Royce "Nene I" and 30 "Derwent V" engines were sold to Russia in 1947.

Questions were asked in 1949, in parliament, about future sales. From Hansard.

"78 and 79. Mr. Donner
asked the Minister of Supply (1) whether, in view of the sale of the Rolls-Royce "Nene" jet engine to the U.S.S.R., he will now give an undertaking that the De Havilland "Goblin" turbo-jet engine will not be sold or presented to that country;

(2) whether, in view of the sale of the Rolls-Royce "Derwent V" jet aero-engine to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, he will give an undertaking that the Rolls-Royce "Avon" and "Tay" jet engines, the De Havilland "Goblin II" and the "Goblin IV" and "Ghost," the two latter now under development, will, in no circumstances, be sold to Russia or any satellite country.


§ Mr. G. R. Strauss
There is no intention of selling any of the engines mentioned, or any other type of jet aero-engine, to Russia or to any other country in Eastern Europe.


§ Mr. Donner
In view of that reply, will the right hon. Gentleman say why these engines were sold, since apparently he now takes the view that it was an unfortunate thing to do?


§ Mr. Strauss
I think that that is the hon. Gentleman's next Question.


§ 80. Mr. Donner
asked the Minister of Supply what types of jet engine were included among the 55 sold to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1947; what were the numbers of each; and why the licences permitting such sales were issued by him.


§ Mr. G. R. Strauss
Twenty-five Rolls-Royce "Nene I" and 30 "Derwent V" engines were sold to Russia. In answer to the second part of the Question, I would refer the hon. Member to the reply given to him by my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Secretary on 6th December last.


§ Mr. Donner
Did the Minister consult the Dominions before the sale, or was he in too great a hurry to facilitate Russian rearmament?"


Cheers

Steve
 
It seems that the pre-war excessive fear of the red menace was exchanged for its opposite: the post-war USSR was much more of an existential threat to the UK than the pre-war one, as it had a much more competent military.
 
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