Early P-80's had the same issues, all early jet engines were 'engine fires and flame-outs waiting to happen'.
Big WW2 German guns shoot down and destroy everything
- Thread starter Destroyer500
- Start date
bintananth
behind a desk
Not to the same degree with the Allison J-33 used by the P-80. That's not a "1st-gen" gas turbine turbojet design. It's "2nd-gen" - so to speak. The last T-33 (the pilot training version of the P-80) in service was retired by the Bolivian Air Force in 2017.
bintananth
behind a desk
London to Berlin is 580 miles. 1,160 there and back. That 540mi does not take into account that the early P-80 pilots have would been extendìng theìr range by idling their drunken-sailor like fuel-hogging turbines and gliding when they could.
No, that was not done... because air-starting a J33 was damn near impossible. Please, stop trying to spew uninformed BS to people who actually have studied the subject.
If gliding could magically extend a 540 mile range to fly over twice the distance plus dogfight on the way, there would have been no need to invent the Mustang since a Spitfire (range up to 1100 miles with drop tank) could pull it out. However, reality says otherwise.
Of course, many designs take a long time to get built. But the 1938 B-29 paper specs and the production models were as different as the original 190 prototypes were from the 190D's.
The 1939 "B-29" was basically a pressurized B-17, hardly the remote-turret gigantic monster the B-29 turned out to be.
Very true, and in any case, the B-29 starting conceptual development in 1938 does not change the fact that it is blatantly dishonest to compare it to the version of the Bf-109 that was *in service* in 1938.
In any case, we can certainly dismiss as utterly ludicrous the idea that the United States will somehow field time-travelling P-80s from 1947 that can magically triple their range by gliding and also magically have the performance of the heavily modified one-off P-80R while still having combat loads, while Germany only has pre-WWII Bf-109Es, to escort B-29 raids on Germany that never happened, all as a ludicrously roundabout argument that German AA was inferior because it couldn't shoot down these imaginary B-29 attacks whereas the Japanese AA guns did.
I mean seriously, WTF.
I mean seriously, WTF.
Destroyer500
Member
O my god what on earth happened here ? I totally forgot i even made this post.Thank god i got notified by email that people started replying here (its a joke i never got an email i just opened the page by accident).I will take my sweet time reading,one of these days,all the comments and try to defend my idea as much as possible or at least have a nice discussion
Hello hello how is everyone doing ? Ok i know the title may sound cartoonish but hear me out lads.I had an idea some months ago about big German guns shooting rocket propelled shells at all kinds of directions in a ww2 setup with the aim of defending the country or bombarding the enemy.
It all started when i learned that Germany was about to make a thing called Langer Gustav that was supposed to shoot 180km far.It was close to 500mms (800mms and with some changes ended being 500mms) big and would shoot rocket propelled shells across the British channel into London and other cities(Schwerer Gustav - Wikipedia go close to the bottom of the page to find it).It was destroyed by the RAF before it was fully assembled and or completed so it never saw action.So i thought to myself 180km is pretty darn impressive,could we make it shoot further ? What if we could make it bigger and at the same time able to shoot further ? What if we could hit far enough so that it could support ground armies the way standard artillery would ? What if we turned that kind of gun to the sky,gave it a shrapnel shell and had it shoot at bomber formations ? Wouldnt it make strategic bombing impossible after a certain point ? What if it could fire at ships ?
To circle back to your original topic, you're hugely underestimating just how resource-intensive guns of this magnitude are to build and operate.
The Germans only ever had a single Schwerer Gustav. The Wikipedia article is incorrect in stating that there was a partially completed second gun named "Dora"; in reality, "Dora" was simply an unofficial nickname for the Schwerer Gustav, originating from its developmental code name of "Implement D". The interchangeable use of the proper name Schwerer Gustav and the nickname Dora in paperwork led Allied intelligence to incorrectly conclude that the Nazis had two such guns, a misconception not definitively resolved until the capture of the Krupp gun works.
The Gustav was designed starting in 1935 for the specific purpose of defeating the super-heavy fortifications of the French Maginot Line. After approval from Hitler himself, Krupp was directed in 1937 to initiate the absolutely secret construction of three guns: Implement D1 (Schwerer Gustav) was to be an conventional 800 mm rifled cannon, Implement D2 (Schwerer Langer Gustav) and Implement D3 (Langer Gustav) were to be fitted with 520mm smoothbore barrel inserts for, respectively, the Peenemünde fin-stablized "arrow shell" and a rocket-assisted version of the Röchling bunker-piercing shell. Contrary to some acccounts, the D2 and D3 cannons were not really "next generation" evolutions of the Schwerer Gustav; they were designed and ordered at the exact same time. Construction of the D2 and D3 cannons continued until they were formally cancelled in November 1944, still incomplete.
In any case, only the D1 cannon was actually completed, and it took Krupp five years to do so, utterly missing the promised deadline of 1940. Krupp was able to escape Hitler's wrath by presenting the delayed cannon "free of charge" as his personal contribution to the war effort, forfeiting the payment of 10 million deutchmarks whch had been earmarked for the project in 1937. No actual use could be made of the gun until February 1942, when it was deployed to the Russian Front in the hope of turning the stalemated siege of Sevastopol. The cannon arrived at Perekop in March 1942, and was held there until April-May while potential firing sites were scouted out and carefully surveyed.
At this point it needs to be pointed out that although it's called a "railroad gun", the Gustav was not something that could actually move on a rail line in its assembled firing configuration. Instead, it had to be taken apart and hauled by an entire train of two locomotives and 28 specially designed freight cars, with five cars carrying the various assemblies of the actual gun and the remaining twenty-five carrying support hardware and ammunition. Once this train reached the selected firing site at Bakhchisaray, it took three weeks for a unit of 1,500 men to actually assemble and set up the gun, starting by laying four heavily reinforced railroad tracks -- an inner pair precisely spaced for the twin rail bogies that made up the gun carriage, and an outer pair for the two 110-ton straddle cranes needed to actually handle the gun pieces. The tracks extended from a heavily camouflaged hide site where the gun was to retreat when not in use, to the actual firing site where the track curved around to permit aiming the cannon.
To be fair, the actual reassembly of the gun sections took "only" three days once all of this preparatory work was complete. Once the assembly process was complete, the siege cannon "only" required a crew of 250 for its operation, but the combination of construction, security troops and anti-aircraft defenses brought the total manpower commitment for the cannon operation to 3,800 men.
As a bottom line, the Schwere Gustav finally opened fire on 5 June 1942. The siege cannon proved able to fire up to once every thirty to forty-five minutes, and in practice its heaviest use was sixteen shells in one day:
5 June 1942: Eight shells fired at Soviet coastal gun emplacements, six shells fired at Fort Stalin
6 Jun 1942: Seven shells fired at Fort Molotov, nine shells fired at the "White Cliff" underwwater ammunition magazine in Severnaya Bay.
7 June 1942: Seven shells fired at Sudwestspitze fortifications.
11 June 1942: Five shells fired at Fort Siberia.
17 June 1942: Five shells fired at Fort Maxim Gorki.
After this there were no targets judged suitable for the Gustav cannon and it remained on standby until the city surrendered on 1 July 1942. The one spare barrel produced was fitted in place of the used one, and the cannon was disassembled for movement to Taizy for possible use against Leningrad, but ultimately remained on standby there throughout the winter of 1942, then was moved back to Germany. "Dora" was then deployed against Stalingrad in August 1942, but did not actually fire any shots before being frantically withdrawn to avoid capture by the advancing German counterattack. It is sometimes claimed that it was used to help crush the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, but other reports say it was only deployed and did not have time to actually set up (which is far more likely since the entire uprising lasted only two months). Ultimately, some parts and ammunition were captured by advancing Allied forces near Auerbach, Bavaria in 1945, but contrary to rumor, no credible source indicates that the *actual gun* was ever found.6 Jun 1942: Seven shells fired at Fort Molotov, nine shells fired at the "White Cliff" underwwater ammunition magazine in Severnaya Bay.
7 June 1942: Seven shells fired at Sudwestspitze fortifications.
11 June 1942: Five shells fired at Fort Siberia.
17 June 1942: Five shells fired at Fort Maxim Gorki.
In the end, Gustav amounted to a ruinously expensive white elephant that was built too late to do the one thing it was actually needed for and only made a minor contribution to one battle afterwards, plus "almost" making another minor contribution to one more battle after that. A hypothetical anti-aircraft version would have required hauling it back to Krupp after Stalingrad to have a completely new gun carriage designed capable of high-angle fire, something that would have been even *more* stupendously massive than it already was, and would certainly not have been complete by the time the war ended -- it took Krupp a solid year to build the original carriage, there is no way a far more complex high-angle mounting could be devised and built in less than two.
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The 800mm modified with smoothbore and firing a comically huge arrow/rochling shell would've been a sight to behold. 520mm is fun and all, but big bore is bigger projectile!
That would have required an even longer barrel, with serious structural issues and an even more stupendously oversized mounting. And keep in mind that Krupp never did get those 520mm smoothbores to actually work correctly even before they were cancelled.
It wouldn't have required a longer barrel really, the barrel was already L/40 which is a decent length, more than enough to stabilize a fin-equipped shell.
It's just that it's range wouldn't come close to the 520mm barrel.
It requires a longer barrel if you want it to remotely work right, something the Germans were slowly figuring out by trial and error With the smaller caliber versions that they were able to experiment with.
The short version is that the stability of long sabot rounds is a function of some complex ratios between length, diameter, and velocity; modern ones are able to fire out of comparatively short barrels because they utilize other tricks to achieve the necessary velocities. The Germans didn’t have access to most of the modern bag of tricks so their only option was longer barrels and fairly extreme sabot downsizing, and even then their Rochling shells had severe issues with accuracy specifically because their velocity wasn't high enough, even though it was much higher than 'normal' shells.
If you ever visit Aubin-Neufchâteau in Belgium, there's a number of Rochling shells on display that were tested there after the Germans occupied it. Note that they're there because despite the Nazis putting considerable effort into retrieving the shells after they were fired, many could not be found because of their inaccuracy scattering them all over the old fortifications, burying themselves deep in the ground.
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Could be possible to fire shorter/fatter Rochling/arrow projectiles out of the 800mm.
Nowhere near as good ballistic potential but I did mention just the spectacle of it, rather than effectiveness lmao.
Shorter, fatter projectiles are called "normal cannon shells".
You can have relatively short APFSDS, or similar finstabilized rounds.
This is hardly the longest projectile for it's diamater.
The round in that picture is short because it's not a sabot round, or even a kinetic at all. That is a BK-13 fin-stabilized HEAT round for the old 2S1 Gvozdika 122mm self-propelled artillery piece.
At this point you're going around in circles; the entire point of the Rochlilng was to be a high-velocity bunker-penetrating round (which is precisely why its inaccuracy was a crippling shortcoming and it saw no operational use), a fin-stabilized HEAT round like this is the exact opposite thing.
At this point you're going around in circles; the entire point of the Rochlilng was to be a high-velocity bunker-penetrating round (which is precisely why its inaccuracy was a crippling shortcoming and it saw no operational use), a fin-stabilized HEAT round like this is the exact opposite thing.
Why not make a laughably huge HEAT-FS round out of the 800mm? Germany did have HEAT-FS during the war after all.
They could build it, but it wouldn't have an actual useful purpose.
Those early HEAT warheads were extremely useful in providing an effective anti-tank round for low velocity artillery pieces which could not fire an effective armor-piercing kinetic round, and also to enable infantry carried anti-tank rockets. They would not be a good choice for an 800mm siege piece, which was too slow and clumsy to ever be fired at an armored vehicle, and was used exclusively as a bombardment weapon against massive fortifications. HEAT explosives would not be effective against that type of target; you want a deep-penetrating round that can physically punch deep into the fortification, then detonate after a delay.