June 17, 1953

JC I look at it this way- The friggin X-4s were in squadron hands already fully tested so how can you speculate they couldn't work? If Luftwaffe pilots could close head on at a combined speed of 700+ MPH and score hits on bombers they could use the integrated sighting/joystick guidance to steer. From a couple miles away at 520 MPH the whole deal would be over real fast. They would have been valid weapons for any bomber box jet or otherwise. The description of intercept, accuisition and shoot down takes more time to read than it does to actually happen.

Hey T.A. why the attitude on fun romp "what if"?

"Obviously, you know nothing of late WW 2 and post war US missile development"

Post war missle development was a result of von Braun. If you are saying this guys "what-if" scenario included them defecting to the US I didn't catch that. Come on, there was no realistic missile program before the Germans got here.

If you're not big enough to give them credit that's OK. Sorry to offend you. No body else in the US would have been able to develop and deploy systems that came into existance here and in Russia by the input of Germans in the same given time line. 10 more years perhaps.

And to be specific the A4b was not the A-9. There is no evidence other than your opinion that there was anything wrong with the A_4 the A9-/A-10 or A-4b. These rockets passed all tests. and if you want to throw all the infant US missiles up there yet say that early German missiles were no good that's fine. But like your US missiles given the same conditions the Germans would have developed their SAMS and others as well if they could have continued. Why would they?

I'm sorry if you can't accept the fact that all the 1st generation US jets were influenced by Germans if only the fact that they got swept wings. It's one of the more known cases in history that the F-86 originally had straight wings and was vastly inproved by the German telling the North American guys about sweep.

I thought Kaiser Wilhelms scenario didn't say that Operation Paperclip happened and the von Braun team went to the US. If I miss understood his scenerio, I'm sorry. I've just never heard anyone not acknowledge the fact that the US owes the basis for its entire defensive system and those little trips to the moon to von Braun and the rest of the Germans who were calculating lunar trajecteries in the early 30s.

Sorry to rile you up T.A. about ficticious points of view, man. But everybody's opinion on fiction is equal and there's no need to get personally insulting. It ain't like I said "there were Italians flying in some IJN planes at Pearl" and attempted to pass that off as fact. Is there some other problem you have with me? I haven't insulted you in any way previously that I can see.

 

The X-4 was a wire guided, optically tracked (by eye only no telescoptic sight or such), and joystick controlled. The firing pattern required a stern chase. A head on attack was not possible due to the closing speeds of the two aircraft which negated the necessary capture time and minimum range of the missile.
In a stern chase the aircraft firing the missile had to fly pretty much straight and level, likely on autopilot, while the pilot (it was intended for use in single seat fighters) controlled the missile during its flight. This meant between the initial lining up on target, firing, capture, and then guidance to its final impact (or miss) the pilot was flying straight and level for nearly half a minute. This is forever in a dogfight.
Then of course, the best evidence we have of wire guided joy stick controlled missile accuracy is that of first generation anti-tank missiles from the 50's to the 70's. The most widely used of these was undoubtedly Sagger. A Sagger operator with good training having fired several dozen real missiles and literally thousands in a simulator could get about 40% hits on a tank at ranges out to about 3000 yards. This dropped to nil when the operator was distracted by things like incoming fire.
Now, we take this situation and apply it to the X-4. Here the operator is also trying to fly an airplane. The aircraft is vibrating, moving at high speed, and not completely stable (ie., it is bouncing around wobbling a bit, etc. which is normal for a fighter to do.). The pilot's target is a speck in the sky several kilometers away. He has no optical aid to aim for it. On top of this, he has to either actually hit the aircraft or get very close for the acoustic fuze to work (if it even does).
While doing this, he has to worry that enemy escort fighters might spot his aircraft and attack him while he is concentrating on flying the missile.
Just as an aside, the Sparrow I initially proved marginally successful too. It used a beam riding radar system and was intended for the same sort of target. One major problem was keeping the radar locked on the target. Any maneuvering would generally result in a miss.

Whether von Braun on any of the other 160 engineers and technicians that Paperclip brought to the US were available they would have really had little impact on the whole of US missile development. I clearly showed that the Paperclip engineers worked at Fort Bliss El Paso TX, White Sands NM, and then Redstone Arsenal AL for the US Army Ordinance department only. The German engineers had NOTHING, NADA, ZIP to do with USAF and USN programs in missiles.
I showed one of the early US successes by Convair, the MX 774 program that developed a very improved V-2 with no German help. The airframe was entirely a Convair design. It got rid of the German conventional airframe and instead had one where the tanks for fuel and oxydizer were an integral part of the airframe and skin. It used a detachable payload nose cone to eliminate the heavy skinning of the German missile that reentered complete. This also allowed for better aerodynamic shape of the missile as a whole.
By using pressurized nitrogen as both a means to push the fuel out of the tanks and as a means of supporting the airframe Charles Bossart's team reduced the weight of the airframe to fuel load by triple.
Bossart's team also came up with a swivelling nozzle design for the engine, something the Von Braun / Peenemünde engineers had rejected as unworkable. This single design change increased engine efficency 17% over the V-2.
Reaction Motors Inc (RMI) the engine builder in addition came up with new turbopump designs that raised the fuel / oxydizer mix flow rate increasing thrust as well.
NONE OF THIS WAS DUE TO ANYTHING THE GERMANS PRODUCED OR DESIGNED.
Convair went on to build the Atlas missile, again owing nothing to the wartime German efforts in this field.

The US Army had Private and Corporal in testing. Both designs owed nothing to Von Braun's or Peenemünde's work. The Nike SAM was a completely US design too. It used a solid fuel booster using fuel developed at GALCIT (later the JPL) in California during the war and a liquid fuel, storable propellant (RFNA and Gasoline in this case) as the sustainer motor, again a wartime US development. The control system was entirely a US design owing nothing to German work.

Both Hughes Aircraft and Naval Weapons Station China Lake developed most of the immediate postwar AAMs entirely without any German input.
North American's Navajo cruise missile and Northrop's Snark / Regulus cruise missile were entirely home grown. North American developed some of the most important booster rocket motors of the 50's through 70's for the US missile program entirely on their own as part of Navajo. The North American / Honeywell inertial navigation system for this missile was critical to most programs by the 70's. This includes NASA's manned space flight missions. Again, no German input.

Von Braun and the Paperclip engineers did have alot to do with a few US programs, notibly Redstone (an improved V-2 using much of the MX 774 and later developments in its design) and, Jupiter a US Army IRBM that saw limited operational service and also was used as a satellite launch vehicle. From there von Braun's team got its chance to work with NASA on the moon flights and Saturn but, the military had pretty much pushed them out of the picture by then, never fully trusting the "ex-Nazis."

The A-9 was redesignated the A-4b for monitary reasons. The A-4 enjoyed a very high priority with the German military while the A-9 was looked on as just another novel experiment. To protect many of the technicians at Peenemünde, Von Braun and Dornberger used this project as an excuse to keep more of them employed there. The system got just two launches. The first was on December 27 1944. This shot became unstable aerodynamically within seconds of launch and crashed. A second launch came in late January 1945 and came apart during the boost phase.
The consensus was that there was not enough known about the wing design and control surfaces for supersonic flight and that the control systems were insufficent to maintain stability.
I'm sure in this scenario that the Germans would have continued their programs and development. But, theirs was far smaller than the US could have mustered both in manpower and money. Even the Nazis could not have kept up wartime spending in peace. Development of missile systems would have been far slower post war for the Germans just as it was for the US.

All? No. Many? Yes. Was this influence substancial? In some areas. In others it was negible, if at all. And, the Germans didn't "tell" North American that, they simply read the German research.

I'm pointing out that it doesn't matter. The Germans had no extant technology that was so far advanced, or so unknown that the rest of the world wouldn't have been able to keep pace with it. The historical evidence is clear. Von Braun had an influence on certain US programs but these were few and far between. Look at the major contractor list for the Atlas and Titan missiles:

Atlas: Convair, General Electric, AC Spark Plug, North American, Burroughs.
Titan: Martin, Bell Telephone, MIT, Aerojet General, AVCO, Remington Rand.

None of these companies benefited in any substancial way from Paperclip in developing these missiles or their systems. I could go through a long list of other projects but the same thing occurs. The German wartime research and scientists were just a minor, very minor, portion of a much greater picture postwar.

I look at "what-if's" as a learning tool. I feel they should be thought experiments that derive from original history and work within that history. As such, all-to-often, many become these vague arguments that lack any depth of historical knowledge. Reality is brushed away, as are technical details that could make the argument valid or invalid. It becomes annoying when this happens repetitively with different people throwing up their pet scenario(s).
If all a "what-if" is is nothing more than a game of Liar's Poker then there is no point to the exercise. Anything goes and the whole exercise devolves from an academic exercise into little kids play.

 

T. A. Gardner, you forgot to mention the AIM-24(IIRC) nuclear AA missile being used to blow holes through the German Defenses.

 

That's fine T.A. I understand. I'll leave the what-ifs to ya and stay off. Take care.

 

"By August 1944, 225 prototype X-4s had been completed, with the first air launched test occurring on August 11, 1944 by an Fw 190. Tests continued through early February 1945, also by Ju 88s. Test flights were also undertaken by a Me 262 jet fighter with two X-4 missiles under the wings outboard of the jet nacelle, but were not launched."

"Tests of the missile were carried out in September of 1944, and although these were successful, the missile operators found that the wire guidance system was too restricting."


"The X-4 did not see operational service and thus was not proven in combat."

 

You are joking, right? Have you ever seen a TOW fly? 3750m of string (ok, wire) and a max flight speed of 300m/s? How can you even reach anything at that speed?

I'm sorry, that's a terribly ignorant very bad example, that's an anti-tank missile, not air-to-air. Excellent for boring long thin holes in B-52s , yes, but sitting in the ground

M-220 Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided missile (TOW) (not wikipedia )

Oh, and I love it when Terry Gardner rolls his sleeves up and get's to work

That's all right, just read and learn something properly and be consistent before you shoot your mouth off. When you walk into a minefield be prepared to be blown up.

 

It is impressive to watch his mind work

 

These words ought to be graven in stone.

 

Hey, I found a fine pic of a TOW missile in flight, this time blowing up the house where Saddam's sons hid! Note the pink plumes.

 

We should get otto to add it to the What if rules. I am sure T.A would be very proud of himself.