He163 and Me262 were both jet aircraft. They may have carried H2O2 as some auxiliary fuel, I suppose. I can't see a `rocket-propelled fighter' being very practical: it would be in-theatre swiftly, out-of-theatre equally swiftly, and be out of juice shortly thereafter.
Having watched that used on a cut on my leg once, as a kid, I've an idea of that experience etched (NPI) on my memory.
Just as a matter of interest, did any of them ever shoot anything down?
Utter desperation. They shot down lots, if developed better & earlier in the war, they'd probably have won it. I've heard from a reliable source (ex-bomber gunner) that if one decided to pick on you, then you'd probably be dead very shortly. Far faster than anything else in the sky and very little you could do about it. Allied fighters used to loiter in the area of the Luftwaffe airfields to try to nail them as they glided in to land; no hope of catching one in flight.
Just to add my bit of pedantry, the Me262 was a jet, the Me163 was a rocket powered aircraft. There was a rocket powred He 176, but as far as I am aware no He-163. At the stage of the war it was used it was a very practical aircraft, in that the 'theatre' was German cities subject to mass daylight bombing raids. The Me163 could sit around and wait for the massed raids to come over, then fly to altitude, attack at speeds that allied aircraft couldn't hope to deal with, and be back on the ground within minutes. However by the time they were deployed Germanies infrastructure and manufacturing were so disrupted that they couldn't be bult in the quantities required They only built a few 100, and they could never deploy them in numbers to do real damage. It is estimated that they shot down about 10 allied planes for 15 Me163s lost in combat, but that hundreds of Me163 were destroyed in landing or takeoff, or due to airfarme failure when mucking about at the edge of the sound barrier. There is a Me-163 in the Science museum in London.
Just to bring things back to D-I-Y - go to
Andy M
POLICE CHIEF: Si! Okay, now, here is the uniform [he hands Neil the uniform] take that with you, and as you go out, watch out for the Special Branch.
[Neil walks out of the station and hits his head on a tree branch]NEIL: I don't see what's so special about that.
TREE BRANCH: I've got a degree in Computer Science, that's what.
NEIL: Oh, yeah, that's quite special.
[From The Young Ones - "Cash"]
Not many thankfully. More info here
I either meant 162 or 178, Google suggests. I'm not sure. A Close Relative spent a fair amount of time in Germany in 1946/7 translating engineering documentation on various fascinating projects (V1, V2, Schmetterling, Me/He??? for various values of ???) and as a result has such a headful of stuff that was secret for so long that he's only ever mentioned it in recent years and tends to get them mixed up, and all I have is mixed-up hearsay. Whichever one it was had a nasty habit of falling out of the sky in increasingly small bits, anyway.
That's perilously close to suicide missions, then, and not the war-winning weapon others might have us believe.
Remind me what the C-Stoff was that they mixed with it to make it go bang?
Isn't so much 'war-winning' about timing? If the Me163 had been operational in substantial quantities in 1943 the daylight bomber offensive would probably have been abandoned and therefore the war would have progressed diffrently, but that sort of speculation is fairly fatuous, because it wasn't. A better case can be made for the rather more deadly Me 262 as a war winning weapon, if had been put into service soonr, although that had atrocious reliability problems.
Andy
He is thinking of the Mescherchmitt Komett - trocket powerd single seat wooden glider/fighter with an on/off rocket engine that usually exploded.
He is thinking of the Mescherchmitt Komett - trocket powerd single seat wooden glider/fighter with an on/off rocket engine that usually exploded.
And were either too fast or too slow to attack anything
It wasn't (practical) and was (out of theatre quickly).
Indeed.
And here are the chemicals used
Roger
T-stoff 80% hydrogen peroxide (oxidiser)
C-stoff hydrazine /methanol mix (fuel)
Z-stoff potassium or calcium permanganate (consumable catalyst - small quantity used)
No I was not. I was well aware the ram jet on the V-1 used a simple fuel like kerosene and did not say the peroxide was the fuel IN the flying bomb. Read again and you will see I said the peroxide was used as a propellant for the V-1 in the launching catapult.
Roger
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