Since we are asking silly weapon questions today, perhaps you can indulge me.
My time-traveller has teamed up with FDR, Churchill and others to form the Super Friends. WW2 has gone pretty well. France was lost, but Scandinavia saved (very critical to British air defense). In the same way, the Germans got Greece but we hold Cyprus. Italy is wisely neutral.
So I want to launch American V-2 cruise missiles at various targets in Germany. I will fire them off B-29 taking off from Cyprus. This is way cool as taking them up high extends their range all to heck. How can I make them accurate enough to hit a city, or even a part of a city?
What say I put up a land-based transmitter in the UK or Norway. My B-29s fly up high until they have line-of-sight to the transmitter and then the missile flies down the beam to the target? But how could I get the missile to know it was high over Berlin?
Presuming we are using only clockwork computers and primitive steam-operated astrolabes, could (considering the size of the earth and lines of sight) a missile fly down one beam and know it was in the right place when a second beam crosses the first?
I suspect it would work but I have no grasp of the distances and altitudes involved.
Just to avoid answering your question entirely, wouldn’t a V-1 be way better? I can see a B-29 carrying at least 3-4 V-1s (1-2 centerline and one on each wing) and launching them in a high arc parabola but without necessarily touching space.
The V1 was the cruise missile. The V2 was a ballistic missile.
Anyway, if you want to guide a ballistic missile like the V2 with primitive tech, you could but a radar transponder in it so it can be accurately tracked at great range. Then based on the radar trajectory and ground based computers, guidance commands could be transmitted to the V2 to keep it on course. Like how the early SAMs from the 50s were guided. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could get a CEP of a mile or less.
If you’re talking about a V1 style cruise missile, then use two radio beams that cross over the target. The missile follows one, and when it detects the other it knows it’s over the target so nose dives.
The Germans did, in fact, use a similar system as proposed in the OP to guide their bombers during the Blitz on England in 1940 - it was called the Knickebein. Later derivatives where enhanched versions. This did require a operator onboard the bomber to actually navigate, but I cannot see this as a very difficult proposition to automate, given WW2 tech. The Germans did after all make a series of guided missiles, using radiowaves, acoustic, thermals, all sorts of guidance.
However, seeing as the Germans invented most of this stuff, I guess they could fairly easy block or jam such a system, as indeed the British did to the German effort in 1940.
That’s exactly the system the Germans used to know when their bombers were over London at night. They called it Knickebein. (Of course, humans were involved in monitoring the beams, but you could probably get a simple radio-activated device to detect where the beams cross.)
If your emitters were somewhere in England, France, or the Low Countries, you could probably use them to mark Berlin. Note this sentence from later in that Wikipedia article:
Considering that V1’s had no difficulty hitting London regularly, why add to the Rube-Goldberg complexity of the system? (George Orwell describes taking lawn chairs to Hampstead Heath overlooking the city from the north and watching the buzz-bombs arrive; when the buzz stopped, the craft would nosedive and a plume of smoke would rise up. Then they would hear the blast.) IIRC, the buzz bombs had distance information plus the latest winds converted to a “fly this heading for this long”. they could be defeated by very fast aircraft (P51?) chasing them, then tipping them with a wing-to-wing maneuver to flip them over. Shooting them from behind was dangerous.
There are no such thing as radio “beams”. You can’t focus radio like a laser. There were 2 directional radio “beacons” - for one, google VOR technology, developed in 1937; I used that learning to fly in the 70’s, now replaced by GPS. The other was real simple, those wrapped coil antennas were very directional - anyone who owned a original hand-held transistor radio could tell you that. You rotate an antenna, and angle vs. relative signal strength gave you a rough clue what direction the signal was, give or take 180 degrees.
Two of the British systems used for electronic navigation were Gee and Oboe. You might want to look at their specifications and see if either system could be modified to do what you want.
This distance calculator will be helpful in determining radio horizons. Inputting a 2000 foot tower with a 35,000 foot observer only gets you a LOS (neglecting refraction) of 328 miles.
Per this site, CEP for the V-1 over a typical flight was ~8 miles. This is with knowing the launch location precisely (fixed surveying). Even with electronic navaids, this won’t be the case from an air launch. Moreover, your CEP is going to be worse with the longer time of flight in your hypo.
Because a system based on air-launched cruise missiles would be way cool and also have a much longer range. I am sort of trying to increase the air campaign against Germany in 1943 rather than 1944 while at the same time reducing Allied aircrew losses and still forcing the Bad Guys to invest in expensive home air defense.
Heh, I must admit i forgot the part about Cyprus:) I was thinking one beam in Oslo, one in northern Sotland, something to that effect.Launch from either location.
V-1s had a propeller on the nose that operated a gear train to measure distance. At a preset distance they dove. A defect in the design caused the engine to stop as a result of the dive…it was the diving that stopped the engine, not the engine stopping that caused the dive. Late production V-1s corrected this flaw, and made their final dives under power. Due to delays related to the speed of sound, it would be very difficult for an observer to determine the relationship between the engine stopping and the bomb diving. As a glider pilot, I frequently am presented with people’s mistaken belief that aircraft will “fall out of the sky” if/when the engine stops.
Relevant to this thread, V-1s also had servo operated guidance mechanism that used a magnetic compass as a reference. So they would fly a constant magnetic heading for set distance, then dive. The V-2 had a more sophisticated guidance system that allowed for the weapons varying attitude during it’s flight, and the fact that a straight flight to the target would not necessarily indicate constant magnetic heading. One of my instructors in college worked on that system.
You are thinking of the US Kettering Aerial Torpedo. It was a drone biplane with a propellor that arrived just a little too late for WWI. Remarkable it claimed an accuracy of 1% or range. This was comparable with tube artillery of the era.
The V2’s, apparently the Germans would drive up to a pre-determined flat area, pour liquid nitrogen over the ground to harden it temporarily, raise up the rocket, fuel it and fire it then drive away. That way, there were no fixed launch sites to be bombed.
If you are relatively sure of the winds aloft, there’s no reason why the same mechanical system as the buzz bombs would not work from air-launch. Just launch from a predetermined position that could be different every time.
The problem is, you could be accurate to within a few miles (London area would be what, about 10 to 20 miles across each way?). However, a bomb of WW2 size was not that effective unless it scored a relatively direct hit. (Except in carpet bombing where you make up for that shortcoming with volume - or just random bombing to induce fear. ) We couldn’t even guarantee a direct hit when flying right over the target and dropping the bomb by direct observation.
Accuracy is good, but what we need(ed) to do was to force the Germans to fight on a new front, air defense. V2 ballistic missiles are expensive and do not force the Bad Guys to defend. V1s are cheap but demand expensive AA guns and lots of fighter planes.
When I was a kid, my Dad had a huge Grundig multi-band radio. We’d switch it to the shortwave bands and tune in these weird stations that just emitted a constant roaring tone (these were air navigation beacons).
Are they still used?
Yes, for 9-11, the Air Force (NORAD) ordered them all shut down to prevent at least some older forms of air navigation from working. It was part of their plans against inbound Soviet bombers.