A4 V2 Rocket

[TheGreenGoblin]

[TheGreenGoblin]

A quick look at the beautifully engineered V2 turbo pump.... Ok, the video is a long one but it is excellent.



http://www.v2rocket.com

[TheGreenGoblin]

The German chap, who produced this very interesting video, has the most outstanding German English accent, and a fastidious and pragmatic approach to the discussion of the effectiveness of the V2 as a weapon of war. Very well produced and interesting.



Interesting factoid - the Germans spent 1.5 times the amount that the Americans spent on The Manhattan Project on both the V1 and V2 weapons. Judged against that fact alone, the V2 wasn't a very successful weapon but its legacy has been hugely important.

[TheGreenGoblin]

A quick look at the beautifully engineered V2 turbo pump.... Ok, the video is a long one but it is excellent.

I notice in the section of the video relating to the ingenious super heated steam generator that drove the turbo-pump at 5000 RPM, that the basic chemistry involved 80% concentrate hydrogen peroxide and a sodium permanganate or potassium permanganate catalyst to generate the steam.

The British became very enamoured of this technique in the RATO\JATO technology arena in the early 50's and it was even proposed to assist take offs for the first generation Comet aircraft.

The world's first jet airliner, the de Havilland DH 106 Comet, included a design provision to carry two hydrogen peroxide-powered de Havilland Sprite booster rockets intended to be installed for hot and high altitude conditions from airports such as Khartoum and Nairobi.These were tested on thirty flights, but the de Havilland Ghost jet engines alone were considered powerful enough and some airlines concluded that rocket motors were impractical. Nevertheless, Sprite fittings were retained on production Comet 1s but were rendered unnecessary with subsequent engine upgrades.

RATO/JATO

Given that the steam efflux would have been a purple colour, in the case of potassium permanganate, it would certainly have been a surreal sight to have seen a Comet taking off in a rocket assisted way.

Deep Purple - Fireball

[ian16th]

I once saw a Valiant do a RATO at Marham.

The angle of attack was 'all wrong'! As the a/c lifted almost vertically.

It also returned with black and burnt, anti radiation high speed finish.

[TheGreenGoblin]

The SAAF purchased Buccaneers were RATO equipped on account of the hot and high operational environment and they were tested thus but were more than equal to places like Hoedspruit etc without JATO assistance...

SAAF Buccaneers

In October 1962, 16 aircraft were ordered by the South African Air Force (SAAF), as the Buccaneer S.50. These were S.2 aircraft with the addition of Bristol Siddeley BS.605 rocket engines to provide additional thrust for the "hot and high" African airfields. The S.50 was also equipped with strengthened undercarriage, and higher capacity wheel brakes, and had manually folded wings. They were equipped to use the AS-30 command guided air-to-surface missiles. Due to the need to patrol the vast coastline, they also specified aerial refueling, and larger 430-US-gallon (1,600 l; 360 imp gal) underwing tanks. Once in service, the extra thrust of the BS.605 rocket engines proved to be unnecessary, and they were eventually removed from all aircraft.South Africa later sought to procure further Buccaneers, but the British government blocked further orders, because of a voluntary arms embargo on that country.

- From WIkipedia

Bristol Siddeley BS.605

The engine used hydrogen peroxide and was kerosene catalyzed...

[TheGreenGoblin]

Another superb video in this series...

[Wodrick]

When I was a boy, possibly around 25, The parents wanted to have a road tour of the East Coast U.S.A. Source of money did not want to drive, he wasn't the worlds greatest driver. They asked me to drive and they would pay my bills.
This was a big trip, Boston, Niagara, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, down the Blue Ridge mountains to Huntsville. Now we know what is in Huntsville don't we ?
Dad knew the son of one of the original German scientists, it's been a while I think his name was Finkel or Frinzel, anyway he took on a guided tour of the Jet Propulsion site and showed us examples of the engines from the V2 to the Atlas at pains to demonstrate how they were all developed from the V2, interesting day that was, a proud German.

sorry for a bit of drift.

[TheGreenGoblin]

sorry for a bit of drift.

Not a bit of it. Your story is really interesting. I have never had the opportunity to visit Huntsville but have seen the V2's at the Imperial War Museum in London and the one in the Smithsonian in Washington.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg ... ce-rocket/

Michael Neufeld, curator of the V-2 exhibition in Washington, is a historian and author of The Rocket and the Reich. He says the V-2 was a technological breakthrough. “It was the first large-scale rocket powered by liquid propellant – liquid oxygen and 75 per cent alcohol fuel,” he says. “It could reach the edge of space. And in many ways it left a dual legacy – it was the origin of cold war intercontinental ballistic missiles, but also of space-launch vehicles.”

As for von Braun's legacy, one is ambivalent and this feeling is best summed up by Tom Lehrer, despite the enormous technical legacy of the work the Germans (and their slaves) did in the development of the V rockets..

[TheGreenGoblin]

I was sitting in my bath whistling the Tom Lehrer tune above when my better half came in and asked what it was I was whistling and when I said what it was she said "Werner von Braun?" and she asked me who he was! So I explained and then she she asked, was he married, did he have kids and not things like how did the V2's turbines work? I didn't know the answers so I did a little searching...



Maybe women's questions in these matters are more apposite sometimes...

[TheGreenGoblin]

I hadn't realised the role that this Austrian Catholic resistance group led by Heinrich Maier played in keeping the Allies informed of the A4/V2 rocket's technical specifications...

The group took care, among other things, of collecting and passing on information about locations, employees and productions about Nazi armaments factories to the Allies. This information for targeted bombing by the Allies was partly passed on to middlemen in Switzerland to the British and Americans. Heinrich Maier stated in the interrogation of the group's strategy on April 27, 1944, that he had hoped to prevent further air strikes on Austrian cities by providing information about the "armaments factories in the Ostmark" and "that this would prevent the other industries that we had after the war absolutely needed, and the civilian population was spared. (...) Shortly thereafter I familiarized Dr. Messner with my plan and talked to him about which armament centers we wanted to reveal to the enemy powers Wiener Neudorf and Wiener Neustadt catch the eye."

The exact drawings of the V-2, the production of the Tiger tank and others could be passed on via Maier's relationship with the Vienna city commander Heinrich Stümpfl. As a result, precise location sketches and production figures for steel mills, weapon, ball bearing and aircraft factories soon reached Allied general staffs. Via Walter Caldonazzi there were contacts to the Heinkel factories in Jenbach, where drive components for the Messerschmitt Me 163 and V-2 rockets were manufactured. In some cases, Maier had received information from front-line soldiers on leave about the industrial facilities. American and British bombers were able to strike armaments factories such as the secret V-rocket factory in Peenemünde and the Messerschmitt plants near Vienna. These contributions by the resistance group via the defense industry and production sites were later to prove to be 92 percent correct and were thus an effective contribution to Allied warfare. On the one hand, the Allies were able to target the arms industry and on the other hand, this information and the subsequent air strikes decisively weakened the supply of the German Air Force.[7]

Messner provided the first information about the mass murder of Jews from his Semperit plant near Auschwitz - a message the enormity of which amazed the Americans in Zurich. However, the Maier-Messner-Caldonazzi resistance group's plan to bring an American transmitter of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) from Liechtenstein to Austria failed. The British SOE was in contact with the Austrian resistance group through its colleague G. E. R. Gedye in 1943, but was not convinced of the reliability of the contact person (Franz Josef Riediger, a Messner employee) and did not cooperate due to security concerns.