URL for "The Wench Bench"

From: William Donzelli <aw288_at_osfn.org>
Date: Thu Dec 20 18:30:48 2001

> BTW, the Germans developed a remotely controlled TV guided bomb during WW2.
> Luckily for the allies the picture broke up as the bomb approached its target
> and
> development was stopped.

The TV-guided glidebombs of World War 2 were too far ahead of their time -
lens technology just was not able keep up. As the bombs reached their
target, there was no way to effectively zoom the image for finer guidance
during the most critical part of the run. Things went out of focus, and
the image turned into mush. So much for guidance. They never did work
well, and only a few really hit their targets effectively (one being the
example given).

The German glide bomb sets were better than the US sets. The US sets
(SCR-549 and SCR-550, ARE/ATE, AN/AXT-series) suffered from extereme
microphonics (virbrations that direct effect the performance of tubes),
and were quite useless in aircraft.

If anyone needs original 1944 AN/AXT-2 Operators Manuals, please contact
me off list.

There were many interesting developements in World War 2, mostly from the
Germans and the US, that really were bleeding edge (mostly secret). Some
of it is quite legendary - the so called "Wizard War" of radar
countermeasures, jet engines, the code breaking - but much of it really
has not been researched much (either because so much of the original
records are lost or recently declassified). Examples of the latter
are heat-seeking missles (US and German), digital encryption (SIGSALY),
passive search radar (Klein-Heidlburg), variously-controlled glide bombs,
magnetic anomaly detection, and so on.

William Donzelli
aw288_at_osfn.org
Received on Thu Dec 20 2001 - 18:30:48 GMT