And end your days drinking yak butter tea and dodging the yetis.
Cold War Aviation Porn
- Thread starter JuanTwoThree
- Start date
With silver service and attitude no doubt.
Idris2002
canadian girlfriend
Hon hon hon
DownwardDog
Riding a Brompton with a power meter.
With great elan using the Mirage IV.
yes! it was called the crepe du jour
Idris2002
canadian girlfriend
Merde
T & P
|-o-| (-o-) |-o-|
I have a friend, now in his mid-70s, who was RAF ground crew at a Vulcan airbase. To this day he likes to tell over a pint the three-minute warning procedure and the regular drills they practised. And more poignantly, how all the ground staff were of course fully aware that if one day the Vulcans were to scramble for real, he and his fellow ground crewmembers would have about a couple of minutes to live after seeing off the airplanes...
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Idris2002
canadian girlfriend
I suppose an Italian bomb would have been "il force de frappucino".
I'm here all week.
pogofish
Testicle Hairstyle
They have one of each at East Fortune:
When I was there last year, a former pilot gave a talk about flying the Vulcan, with us all standing under it!
T & P
|-o-| (-o-) |-o-|
Not Cold War but as a V2 pic has just been posted...
I know other factors such misleading reports by British intelligence in the press played a part, but from a purely technological standpoint, does anyone know how the V1s performed vs the V2s regarding target accuracy? I guess it’s almost impossible to tell when the overall target was an area as large as central London, but did either were used and perform well on more precision-driven strikes against smaller targets?
I know other factors such misleading reports by British intelligence in the press played a part, but from a purely technological standpoint, does anyone know how the V1s performed vs the V2s regarding target accuracy? I guess it’s almost impossible to tell when the overall target was an area as large as central London, but did either were used and perform well on more precision-driven strikes against smaller targets?
existentialist
Tired and unemotional
Target accuracy wasn't an issue, particularly, for either V1 or V2 - mostly because they couldn't guarantee much in the way of accuracy to start with. V1 relied on techniques that were dependent on prevailing weather, and accurate reports of landings (which were in the hands of almost-entirely-turned German agents), V2 was more indiscriminate, and was pretty much just sub-orbital dead reckoning.
The point of both weapons was that they were not so much strategic as "terror" weapons - so an indiscriminate pattern served their purpose very well. Ironically, the (strategic) aim of misleading Germany that they were falling short tended to increase the (terror) component as V1s started falling on leafy Surrey villages and cosy South London suburbia,
Manchester was also targeted by V1s on Christmas Eve morning 1944.
The north of England was beyond the range of the V1s launched from the sites in occupied Europe. Though by launching from Heinkel He111 the rest of the country could be terrorised.
In the Christmas Eve attack on Manchester, 45 V1s were launched from Heinkels just off the Yorkshire coast. There was a 30 minute flight before they dropped. 14 fell into the sea, 31 crossed the coast, 7 reached what is now Greater Manchester.
Biggest casualties in Oldham where 27 people were killed. In total 42 killed, 109 injured, 51 seriously.
An effective weapon of terror, though little accuracy, of those launched in this attack, one hit Chester, one landed in County Durham and another landed in Woodford Northamptonshire.
Over a 1000 V1s were launched from aircraft during this campaign, thus spreading the fear through the civilian population.
The Manchester attack.
I will try and add link later.
The north of England was beyond the range of the V1s launched from the sites in occupied Europe. Though by launching from Heinkel He111 the rest of the country could be terrorised.
In the Christmas Eve attack on Manchester, 45 V1s were launched from Heinkels just off the Yorkshire coast. There was a 30 minute flight before they dropped. 14 fell into the sea, 31 crossed the coast, 7 reached what is now Greater Manchester.
Biggest casualties in Oldham where 27 people were killed. In total 42 killed, 109 injured, 51 seriously.
An effective weapon of terror, though little accuracy, of those launched in this attack, one hit Chester, one landed in County Durham and another landed in Woodford Northamptonshire.
Over a 1000 V1s were launched from aircraft during this campaign, thus spreading the fear through the civilian population.
The Manchester attack.
I will try and add link later.
V1 attack on Manchester, Christmas Eve 1944
Luftwaffe V1 attack on Manchester, Christmas Eve 1944
aircrashsites.co.uk
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A380
How do I change this 'custom title' thing then?
Likes from a historical, I didn’t know that, perspective not liked. But I didn’t know they could be air launched.
existentialist
Tired and unemotional
The Nazi regime had a fairly major problem with the V1 - range. Well, range and accuracy. The range of the thing meant that, to reach southern England, the launchers had to be in Northern France, and latterly Belgium. As the Allies pushed them back, they pushed the V1 launches further away from their target. The other problem was that ground-launched V1s needed a fair amount of quite identifiable infrastructure on the ground - an invitation to a bombing raid. So the air-launched option gave them several advantages over ground launching, but also the disadvantage of even greater inaccuracy (the weapon would dead-reckon its way from launch - using a little geared vane on the front, which unwound a screw that cut off the fuel supply at the correct moment), as the launch position was (obviously) not a fixed point.
The V2 had fewer of these problems - firstly, they had a very slick operation involving a collection of specialised vehicles, which meant that they could drive to any convenient bit of woodland (or various bits of Belgian roadway), and be set up and ready to launch within a few hours. Range, too, was less of an issue - when you're pinging something dozens of miles up into the air, a few tends of miles one way or the other isn't a big deal, range-wise. And, as a weapon of fear, all it had to do was occasionally land somewhere and cause huge loss of life - which it occasionally did - and the job was done. The fear element of the V2 was greater, as well, because you didn't get the whole buzzing-stopping-bang thing. Just an almighty explosion out of nowhere. In fact, our efforts to counter the V2 were seriously hampered by great levels of disbelief in government that the V2 even existed - they kept confusing V1 intelligence and V2 stuff, until quite a while after the damn things were landing on us.
Idris2002
canadian girlfriend
Bringing the thread back to the Cold War theme, the US took the V1's "proof of concept" and used it to make this thing:
en.wikipedia.org
MGM-1 Matador - Wikipedia
Idris2002
canadian girlfriend
spitfire
Walty McWaltface
Veering back to earlier V2's this is worth a visit if you've time on the run in/out of Calais. Takes a couple of hours to go round, it's 10 minutes from the main autoroute.
www.lacoupole-france.co.uk
La Coupole, located 5 km from Saint-Omer (Nord-Pas-de-Calais), is one of the most impressive remnants of the Second World War in Europe. It is a symbolic place of the Nazi oppression, due to its overwhelming mass, the nature of its underground facilities and the suffering of the slave labourers who built it.
HOMEPAGE - La Coupole
La Coupole, located 5 km from Saint-Omer (Nord-Pas-de-Calais), is one of the most impressive remnants of the Second World War in Europe. It is a symbolic place of the Nazi oppression, due to its overwhelming mass, the nature of its underground facilities and the suffering of the slave labourers who built it.
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Bristol Bloodhound missile, this is at the RAF Museum Hendon.
Used as part of the deterrent force alongside the V bombers, to protect from attack on the V bomber bases.
They were stationed near here at RAF Misson, one mile to the east of RAF Finningley the bomber base. Controlled from RAF Lindholme two miles to the north.
The old RAF Misson site is now a military vehicle and hardware site, coincidentally called The Rocket Site.
The last time I went past there was a Bloodhound on a static display like the one pictured above.
pogofish
Testicle Hairstyle
Not really - The Americans (and as intimated above, the USSR and China) had a succession of designs/projects based on the V2 to greater and lesser degrees in the early Cold War - in the US’s case, very numerous projects that went-on right-up to the Redstone Rocket, when a decision was taken to separate the various design efforts into military and civilian/pure research projects - with only purely American-led designs/projects being used for USAF ICBM purposes. Hence Karel Bossart‘s (Belgian but working in the US since the 1920’s) proposal was picked-up and developed into the Atlas family of rockets (with Martin’s Titan as the fallback plan!), whilst Von Braun and his team took the more ostensibly civilian/pure research NACA/NASA route, although Von Braun did remain director of Army Rocketry up to 1958 before switching to NASA.
IIRC some of the Nazi’s smaller missile designs were also developed into viable projects by the US - and one, whose number I forget had a considerable service life, using a mixture of captured German parts and later US-designed modifications, right through its career.
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pogofish
Testicle Hairstyle
Bringing the thread back to the Cold War theme, the US took the V1's "proof of concept" and used it to make this thing:
MGM-1 Matador - Wikipedia
As well as the Matador, the US had a collaboration between Republic and Ford that produced the appropriately named “Loon” missile - which was nothing more than a reverse-engineered V1. Tens of thousands of the things were ordered in 1944 for use against Germany and Japan but the end of the war in Europe meant they were never needed.
For Japan, a 180-day bombardment with Loons was planned in advance of the main invasion but again, the Atomic Bomb stymied that plan and most of the @1400 actually built were used in the development of guidance systems for later missiles, the most unfeasible of submarine-launched missiles and as target drones. A few survived though:
Chz
Stark Raving Sane
Well you can see where they got the idea for Regulus from that...As well as the Matador, the US had a collaboration between Republic and Ford that produced the appropriately named “Loon” missile - which was nothing more than a reverse-engineered V1. Tens of thousands of the things were ordered in 1944 for use against Germany and Japan but the end of the war in Europe meant they were never needed.
For Japan, a 180-day bombardment with Loons was planned in advance of the main invasion but again, the Atomic Bomb stymied that plan and most of the @1400 actually built were used in the development of guidance systems for later missiles, the most unfeasible of submarine-launched missiles and as target drones. A few survived though:
pogofish
Testicle Hairstyle
The British got the greatest accuracy out of the V2 in Operation Backfire post-WW2, where they were able to get a small number of missiles assembled from parts salvaged from the Mittelwerk to within three miles of their targets. Which was better than the Germans or Americans ever managed.
These were the launches, using captured German operators that were filmed and are now often miscredited as “real” German V2 launches.
Out of Backfire, came a proposal for an “Operation Megaroc”, which has generally been considered viable. So if it had been funded, it could have put a British Astronaut in space (just!) as early as 1951 - but with our Government’s typical post-war foresight, the money was not forthcoming.
Megaroc – The British Interplanetary Society
The “Megaroc” man-carrying rocket proposal had been put forward by R.A. Smith in 1946 after H.E. Ross observed that the […]
Lancman
Well-Known Member
Continuing the derail.
Standing in “lines” prior to going into school one beautiful morning in 1944 we all heard a loud explosion in the sky and looking up saw a spiralling, tumbling contrail that ended with a white puffball. A V2 had malfunctioned high overhead.
Nearly 50 years later my wife and I watched Scuds being intercepted by Patriots over Dharan from our rooftop in Bahrain.
Not “coldwar” but bracketing it.
“Time to Die” ?
Standing in “lines” prior to going into school one beautiful morning in 1944 we all heard a loud explosion in the sky and looking up saw a spiralling, tumbling contrail that ended with a white puffball. A V2 had malfunctioned high overhead.
Nearly 50 years later my wife and I watched Scuds being intercepted by Patriots over Dharan from our rooftop in Bahrain.
Not “coldwar” but bracketing it.
“Time to Die” ?
not-bono-ever
meh
Veering back to earlier V2's this is worth a visit if you've time on the run in/out of Calais. Takes a couple of hours to go round, it's 10 minutes from the main autoroute.
HOMEPAGE - La Coupole
La Coupole, located 5 km from Saint-Omer (Nord-Pas-de-Calais), is one of the most impressive remnants of the Second World War in Europe. It is a symbolic place of the Nazi oppression, due to its overwhelming mass, the nature of its underground facilities and the suffering of the slave labourers who built it.
View attachment 213939
oh yes. the whole area is full of legacy brutalist concrete.
also the first moon rocket was a v2
