players in a prolonged war

[kool kitty89]

Oh, and for those who didn't know, the USAF had Canberra licence built in the US as well. (though they did develop their own unique variants)



B-57 Canberra - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[HoHun]

Hi Kool Kitty,

>That doesn't seem right for the P-38, even with only the 165 gal tanks it could manage over 1,700 mi in combat configuration, though less if cruising above cruise power.

Well, you're invited to use the cruise chart you linked to establish the range according to the same mission profile as the two jets for perfect comparability

>Another thing to considder is that the P-80's would not have to fly faster than optimum cruise speed as the bombers would be slower reguardless. (even assuming B-29's or B-50's)

That's how I calculated range. The mission really is 10 minutes of target cover and no en-route protection at all. That would yield considerably shorter ranges due to the need to zigzag to stay in touch with the much slower propeller-driven heavy bombers.

Regards,

Henning (HoHun)

[kool kitty89]

If the P-38 was cruising at max cont. power it would probably be both slower and shorter ranged than the P-80A operating at optimum cruise, with both at 30,000 ft.
At low altitude and ~200 mph cruise, the P-38 could certainly out range the P-38 by >2x, and with 2x 300 gal tanks it could out range any other Single seat fighter at optimum cruise, save maybe the P-47N. As mentioned in the report, the jets had ~2.5x the range at altitude tham SL.

[davparlr]

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.

The YB-49 could not make the trip one way with weapons. It had a ferry range of 3575 miles.

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

I am not sure this is correct. According to the book “Northrop, an Aeronautical History” (published by Northrop), “Early YB-49 flight testing turned up inadequate rates of yaw oscillation damping, a condition that is vital for a stable bombing platform. As a corrective action, a Minneapolis Honeywell Electronic Yaw Stabilization System, or “Little Herbert” was installed. This bombing autopilot made the YB-49 into a very stable platform.”

According to the book, the exact cause of the crash of the YB-49 is not known. It is believed that “excessive positive acceleration as would occur in a severe gust, pull up, or pitch-up” caused the wing to fail. The aircraft was very clean and would accelerate rapidly (as would the B-2, which I have flown in the simulator) and over-speed followed by a pull-out could have been a factor. It also said that that wind tunnel test demonstrated that the wing would not tumble.

The wing had much potential as shown by the fact that the B-2 is almost the same size as the YB-49. Its cancellation is questionable and a couple of things stand out, first, why were all the aircraft scrapped (a travesty and it crushed John Northrop and ruined his health), and, the Secretary of the Air Force (Stuart Symington) joined Consolidated when he left government. The book mentioned none of this.

Hi Davparlr,


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.

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.

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.

I think you can assume that both sides were, by this time adept at Radar and ECM and that there would be continuing cycles of success and counter success. One side would come out with a successful tactic, like SAMs, and the other side would endure losses until they would figure it out and provide effective countermeasures. This was the trait in WWII and would probably not have changed. 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.

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.

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 ...

I think the B-17/24s would have been quickly replaced with B-29s and 32s and also, the B-50 would have been expedited (the XB-44 was flying in May 44). It is, as you say, tough hitting anything from above 30k, as the Allies found out bombing Japan, however, remember the saying “close only counts in horseshoes and atom bombs”.

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.

I didn’t mean to imply that the SAMs were at their range limit, only AAA. I was just saying that acoustic and visual guidance proved out to not be effective, especially at high altitude

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?

I don’t have any EMC references, but googling came up with several radar jammers used by the Allies.
Airborne Grocer
Mandrel
Moonshine

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. Towed and dropped decoys would probably be very effective.

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 ...)

There was continuous hop scotching technologies. The Germans would be ahead, then the Allies, etc.

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.

If it was reliable, I have one resource that said that only 25% of the Wasserfalls prototypes got past the crashing stage. It took many years to develop reliable SAMs after the war with much better radar and electronics and computers and propulsion. It’s a long way from doing demos to fielding weapons systems, sometimes forever.

Davparlr,

Exactly in what way were the Allies ahead in the electronics according to you ??

If we're talking radar the Germans mostly fielded equal or better equipment, although not in anywhere near as large a scale.

German radar was advanced at the beginning of the war, however, integration of radar into an effective defensive system was much further advanced with the British (they were more defense minded). I have heard that the French had better and more tanks than Germany did at the time of the invasion but didn't know how to use them. The Germans were in a simialar situation on radar. Later in the war, I think Allied radar technology was more advanced.

The Germans were also far ahead when it came to homing devices & infrared imaging amongst other things..

Yes, it seems that way.

And regarding computers, well the Germans were also way ahead in this department being the first to ever have them and use them on a/c.

Rudimentary stuff with no capability to process data necessary to integrate a large defensive system under the attack of 1000s of targets in a jamming and decoyed environment.

The best direction to be pointing attention to would've been first and foremost the proper deployment of the already ready to go jets at hand, instead of the mindless decision of appointing them the task of bombing.

YES. If Germany had fielded a sufficient number of Me-262 in late 43, early 44, D-Day would have been a dicey situation. I do not believe that day bombing would have continued and I do not believe any Allied jets could have provided escort over Germany until bases in Europe, other than Britain, could be provided. It would have been a different war.

Would the Allies have had to have bases in Europe to use their jets? Would they be able to offer jet escort duty from England, etc. with extra fuel tanks? Or would they still have to use piston-engined fighter escort?

I do not think any Allied jet could fly from England, fly to Germany, jettison fuel tanks (except the P-80 wingtip tanks), fly a combat mission, and return to England.

You are quite right - there was longer-ranged and higher reaching artillery, but it could not compete with SAMs in terms of efficiency.

The average amount of rounds necessary for one kill in WW2:

8.8 cm Flak 36/37: 16000 rounds
8.8 cm Flak 41: 8500 rounds
10.5 cm Flak 39: 6000 rounds
12.8 cm Flak 40: 3000 rounds

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

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

I am not sure this is correct. According to the book “Northrop, an Aeronautical History” (published by Northrop), “Early YB-49 flight testing turned up inadequate rates of yaw oscillation damping, a condition that is vital for a stable bombing platform. As a corrective action, a Minneapolis Honeywell Electronic Yaw Stabilization System, or “Little Herbert” was installed. This bombing autopilot made the YB-49 into a very stable platform.”

According to the book, the exact cause of the crash of the YB-49 is not known. It is believed that “excessive positive acceleration as would occur in a severe gust, pull up, or pitch-up” caused the wing to fail. The aircraft was very clean and would accelerate rapidly (as would the B-2, which I have flown in the simulator) and over-speed followed by a pull-out could have been a factor. It also said that that wind tunnel test demonstrated that the wing would not tumble.

The wing had much potential as shown by the fact that the B-2 is almost the same size as the YB-49. Its cancellation is questionable and a couple of things stand out, first, why were all the aircraft scrapped (a travesty and it crushed John Northrop and ruined his health), and, the Secretary of the Air Force (Stuart Symington) joined Consolidated when he left government. The book mentioned none of this.

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.

[HoHun]

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)

[Glider]

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

[HoHun]

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)

[delcyros]

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

[Glider]

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.

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.

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.

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.

[HoHun]

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)

[delcyros]

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/avi...ce-913-11.html (What plane do you wish had sawservice)

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.

[drgondog]

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?

[HoHun]

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)

[drgondog]

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.

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