thos@softway.sw.oz.au (Thomas Cohen) (02/21/91)
From: thos@softway.sw.oz.au (Thomas Cohen) In article <1991Feb18.062706.15364@cbnews.att.com> hhm@ihlpy.att.com (Herschel H Mayo) writes: > > >From: hhm@ihlpy.att.com (Herschel H Mayo) >I seem to recall, from reading the book by Walter Dornberger, >that the V3 was NOT a gun at all as Nova claimed. It was a >complex of underground rails for launching rockets. The gun >with the multiple charges was jokingly called the caterpillar, Source: "The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Artillery" by Ian V Hogg 'High Pressure Pump' also as 'Hockdruckpumpe' (HDP), 'busy Lizzie', 'the centipede' and 'Vergeltungswaffe 3': The details boil down to it being a manifestation of the multiple chamber gun, which started as far back as the 1880s with the Lyman and Haskell gun. An engineer with Rochling Steel (the folks who made the concrete piercing shell I mentioned in various other posts) developed a 20mm scale model which apparently worked well. A report was sent through Speer to Hitler proposing a battery of 50 15cm HDP barrels to be built into the hillside near Mimoyecques and aimed at London. This was approved before even a working gun was not yet made. A short 15cm gun had been installed at the Hillersleben Proving ground by Sept '43. They had the same problem of the flash leaking forward and igniting the side charges in advance of the projectile, and providing enormous back pressures (the Lyman Haskell gun of 1870, 6", had a muzzle velocity of 1099 ft/sec despite barrel pressures as high as 38 ton/sq in). The Germans cured this by using an efficient sealing piston behind the projectile. A full length gun (150') was assembled at Misdroy on the Baltic coast and firing trials and traning commenced. After redesigning the shell to be stable in flight and stopping the barrel bursting at various times, by May '44 most of the technical problems appeared to have been solved, and the predicted maximum range of 93 miles was in sight. However, with the invasion due in June, the site at Mimoyecques was discovered and pounded. Two short versions of the 15cm HDP were assembled and sent into action. One was mounted on a railway flatcar and fired into Antwerp, and the other was laid out on a hillside near Hermeskeil and fired into Luxembourg". No performance data is available about either of these weapons. The planned performance for the full size HDP was 492' barrel length, fixed elevation of 55 deg, 83kg shell, muzzle velocity of 1,463m/sec (4800 ft/sec) for a range of 150 km. I'm inclined to believe that it was a gun. They didn't have any rockets that I know of (which doesn't cover a lot) that were rail launched apart from the 150cm NebelWerfer style rockets. If you need a rail launch then it implies that your rocket is purely ballistic in trajectory, otherwise you could just launch it like a V2. > Larry Mayo -- thos cohen |Softway Pty Ltd "Stopping to pick up passengers would disrupt |ACSnet: thos@softway.oz the timetable" - Alderman Cholerton, on why|UUCP: ...!uunet!softway.oz!thos the council's buses didn't stop for passengers|Internet: thos@softway.oz.au