players in a prolonged war

[davparlr]

I think that German SAMs would have been relatively easy to defeat with comparitively simple technology. Imagine a 1000 plane bomber strike with each plane pulling a simple reflector decoy and intermittantly dropping chaff, that's 2000 very noisy targets on one raid, intermix a few Brits jamming and meaconing German tracking and search radars and command links, and I think you have a nightmare for the relatively new and crude SAM weapons infrastructure. They would have been relegated to ballistic launches ala North Vietnam.

I don't think proximity artillery shells would have been much help. B-29s and B-44/50 (which undoubtable could have been available in '46-7) would have been flying at the max altitude of the 88, which would have had to fire almost vertically to reach those bombers, thus having almost zero area coverage.

[Flyboy2]

Yeah, with chaff and eventually flares, the missiles would have been so confused that losses would have been minimal. So does that mean we can finally forget about SAM's and move on to talking about the aircraft, which I think the originator of this thread wanted us to do?
Please don't behead me if you disagree

[HoHun]

Hi Davparlr,

>I think that German SAMs would have been relatively easy to defeat with comparitively simple technology.

Hm, I doubt it. The projected SAMs did not rely on a single guidance technology common to all, so it would have been difficult to jam them all. One of the most advanced sensors (for terminal guidance) worked on an acoustic basis. (Guess they got their inspiration from the submariners Hard to jam that! Some missiles were beam-riders, other were manually-controlled line-of-sight guided ... you don't even need a radar for that.

And the lessons learned the from 1973 war when Israeli-operated US technology fought Arab-operated Soviet technology was that you can only jam something after it has been used against you - which means only after you have taken losses. It has been claimed that this was one of the reasons stealth technology was developed - it was meant to eliminate the initial losses.

I'd certainly agree that the deployment of SAMs in WW2 would have started a new electronics arms race, though.

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)

[kool kitty89]

And the R4M would have worked great on the Fw 190 and Fw 187 as well.

Personaly I think the Fw 187 coulh have been the best LW interceptor 'till the jets came along. With excelent speed, climb, and a heavy weapons load. (with DB 605 probably faster than any allied competition 'till late 1944)

Alot of this discussion fits more in the Mistakes in Aviation thread...

[davparlr]

Originally Posted by HoHun

Hi Davparlr,

>I think that German SAMs would have been relatively easy to defeat with comparitively simple technology.

Hm, I doubt it. The projected SAMs did not rely on a single guidance technology common to all, so it would have been difficult to jam them all.

I am sure there were not a whole lot of variables here

One of the most advanced sensors (for terminal guidance) worked on an acoustic basis. (Guess they got their inspiration from the submariners Hard to jam that! Some missiles were beam-riders, other were manually-controlled line-of-sight guided ... you don't even need a radar for that.

I don't think either of these proved to be effective against high flying bombers (30k+)since there were no follow-on designs. Acoustic had to get close, and that required radar, which could be messed up, and I don't think line-of-sight worked well, certainly not at night.

And the lessons learned the from 1973 war when Israeli-operated US technology fought Arab-operated Soviet technology was that you can only jam something after it has been used ag
ainst you - which means only after you have taken losses.

This was only after the Russians learned a lesson when all their missiles in Vietnam were made useless by jamming. The Germans would have to learn this lesson first. In addition, the Brits had been playing this game for many years and proved to be quickly adaptable and effective.

Without Doppler radar, isolating a moving target against a chaff target or dropped decoy would have had to be done manually and I think this alone would be overwhelming and time consuming, and remember 50% of the moving targets that were identified would be decoys. There is a lot of difference between attacking a solo, unjammed drone with a single launch site and attacking thousands of jamming and decoying targets with hundreds of sites that are not fully integrated. I think the complexity of addressing this problem was very high and I don't think the Germans had the technology (high speed processors and fully integrated sites) to make this defense effective.

[davparlr]

Originally Posted by Flyboy2

In late-war Germany the Horton brothers had designs for huge flying wing bombers which could have reached America.

It took Northrop, with much more experience in flying wings, four years to develop the B-35, so, you can figure that it would take the Horton brothers at least that long to do the same. The plane could not be available till 1949. In addition, the wing would have to be conventionally powered. The B-35 was powered by four 3000 hp engines. The Germans had no engine of similar power (at least in a reasonable design) so the plane would need six engines, and would not be stealth. The jet powered version had no hope. The B-2 bomber, with much more efficient turbofan engines, much better aerodynamics, and superior material construction (light), would be hard pressed to make the round trip to Germany and back with 10,000 lbs of bombs (WWII A-bomb). In fact, a one way trip for the German plane would probably be impossible.

[kool kitty89]

The YB-49 had the range and load capacity, but not the physical space for the huge girth of first gen fusion bombs. Though stability was a concern still (improved with the verticle stablizers) the major problem, which caused the total cancellation of the project, was structural problems in high speed maneuvering which resulted in structural failures with fatal results.

It also wasn't stealth, though it was aerodynamically efficient.

[FLYBOYJ]

Originally Posted by kool kitty89

the major problem, which caused the total cancellation of the project, was structural problems in high speed maneuvering which resulted in structural failures with fatal results.

Are you talking about the Capt. Edwards crash?

On May 28, 1948, the second YB-49 (42-102368 ) was turned over to the USAF. Only a few days later, tragedy struck. On the morning of June 5, 1948, 42-102368 crashed just north of Muroc Dry Lake. The pilot, Air Force Capt. Glenn Edwards, and all four other members of the crew were killed. What caused the crash is not known, but it was suspected that Capt Edwards managed to surpass the "red line" speed of the aircraft while descending from 40,000 feet, causing the outer wing panels to be shed and the aircraft to disintegrate in midair.

[krieghund]

Dudes, the Northrop flying wings were killed because of political reasons not technical....The then Sec of Def wanted Northrop to merge with Consoladated-Vultee and Northrop refused......so the revenge continues..crappy contracts and screw jobs until the B-2 and now the tanker.

Actually the Horton Bros were probally way ahead of the Northrop in solving certain problems which were quickly borrowed once WWII ended. Horton's just didn't have the industrial base to build on, it doesn't help when your getting bombed constantly.


Loose the dogs....

[FLYBOYJ]

Originally Posted by krieghund

Dudes, the Northrop flying wings were killed because of political reasons not technical...

True - but the crash and later engine fire didn't help their cause.

Northrop - crappy contracts and screw jobs?

F-89
F-5
T-38

I wish I had one half percent of the money made on those programs.

I'm not even including Northrop electronics and other divisions who over the years have done very well - and all this way before the Grumman merger.

On top of this do you know who built the fuslage for the 747?

Although Northrop is known largely as a military contractor -- 90 percent of its $5.7 billion in 1991 revenue came from the Pentagon -- it has a small presence in commercial aircraft manufacturing. Northrop has built fuselages for the Boeing 747 jetliner since the 1960's.

COMPANY NEWS; Northrop in Talks on a General Dynamics Unit - New York Times

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

No large flying wing designs were going to be seriously succesful until fly by wire technology came online.

[HoHun]

Hi Davparlr,

>I am sure there were not a whole lot of variables here

As the saying goes - you can fool some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. The projected SAM systems were different enough to avoid localized vulnerabilities as requried for knock-out jamming.

Anyway, I don't think one can assum the Allies to be automatically superior in the electronic arms race that would follow a SAM deployment, and the time delay between deployment of a weapon and development of an effective counter-measure is inevitable.

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.

>I don't think either of these proved to be effective against high flying bombers (30k+)

Flying at 30000 ft was not common practice in 1945. The B-17s and B-24s might have changed these altitudes, but not without serious loss in operational effectiveness, which would have been a victory for the air defense, too. Even the B-29, which might have been deployed to Europe, had proven to be clearly more effective at altitudes below 30000 ft than at altitudes above ...

However, even the down-scaled Wasserfall C was demonstrated to an altitude of 12 km (39000 ft), so I don't know how you arrive at the 30000 ft limit. The original Wasserfall had been designed for 15 km altitude, and with the (also projected) two stage configuration, the sky was no limit. Remember that the V-2 rocket routinely far, far exceeded these altitudes with no problem at all.

>Acoustic had to get close, and that required radar, which could be messed up, and I don't think line-of-sight worked well, certainly not at night.

Radar "could" be messed up ... the question was, "would" it be messed up? I don't think there was much actual radar-jamming going on except for chaff decoying - for which the ground radars in 1945 had long been equipped with counter-counter-measures. The voice communications frequencies were routinely jammed, but radar?

>Without Doppler radar, isolating a moving target against a chaff target or dropped decoy would have had to be done manually

There was ECCM gear on the German ground radars for that, like for example "Würzlaus" for the "Würzburg" radar. (And from what I know, Doppler radar was actually used for controlling the V-2 trajectory, so it was within technological reach ...)

Oh, and I just found an interesting figure in Griehl's book ... the cost of killing a bomber with anti-aircraft artillery was 4 million Reichsmark in Flak shells alone. The Wasserfall would have cost 10000 RM in the initial production, 7000 RM at full-scale mass production. That means that even with a probability of kill of just 25%, the cost of shooting down one bomber would have dropped to one hundreth of what it had been before.

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)

[Flyboy2]

Ok mabye I got a little too excited about the Horton flying wings, they are pretty sick though.

Guys Northrop is one of the best aircraft manufacturers out their!! Seriously, Jack Northrop was amazing!

[kool kitty89]

While as Adler pointed out, large flying wings wern't practical w/out fly-by-wire, smaller ones might have been woukable.

Look at all the powered flying wing experemental a/c the Horten brothers made, which were stable enough.

The Northrop N1-M and other early test craft worked, and the N9-M (scaled down B-35 test craft) did too, but the full sized thing didn't work out too well. The N9-M was saved by Planes of fame and was kept flying. (though, it was damaged in early '06 and I'm not sure if it's back yet)

[evangilder]

Last I heard, the N9M was still not flying. It suffered an engine fire in one of the Franklins.