Comments by "Keit Hammleter" (@keithammleter3824) on "Imperial War Museums" channel.

@wcg19891 : Not applicable to the V2 as it was sub-orbital. Von Braun proved that you need a 2- or 3-stage rocket to attain orbital velocity. The V2 was only single stage. All weapon rockets can and are fired in any desired direction - it makes no difference, because they are not intended to put the payload in orbit. Not much point in blowing up a vacuum. The V2 was always fired west, simply because London was west of where Germans had launch sites. While going east helps attain orbit, the main reason for going east of the Kennedy Space centre or if you like, choosing the location to launch from, is that it means going over ocean and not land where people live, so that if there is a malfunction people won't get hurt.
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Hardly a huge mistake, as it delivered a payload about the same as half the bomb load of Germany's main heavy bomber the He-111. And coming at you at Mach 3, there was absolutely no defence against it - it was years before the USA developed a way of destroying ICBMs in flight. At a cost of about 50,000 reichmarks each, it was far cheaper than half a He-111 bomber (>400,000 RM) and just as accurate. Hitler and Goering's only mistake was in not allocating more boffins to von Braun's team to get the teething problems solved in a timely way.
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What was known to both Whittle and his engineering team and the Germans was that axial flow enables as a more efficient engine, and it has less front area, so less aircraft drag. That's why the Germans persisted with it, but to get the advantages in practice requires a greater mastery of materials and a greater mastery of compressor blade design. The Germans never really mastered axial flow engine design before the war ended - their engines were not as efficient as they could have been, and their service life was very short. The Russians tried to get it right, starting with captured German engines and engineers, but it was taking too long, so they famously contracted with Rolls Royce to build centrifugal flow Nenes in Russia under license. Meanwhile in war-time Britain, Whittle was able to take advantage of Rolls Royce expertise in piston engine turbochargers, in which compressor design factors are exactly the same as in centrifugal jet engine compressor stages. So, lower stresses on parts plus existing British expertise led to the use of centrifugal flow until post war when Rolls Royce was able to use American axial flow know-how.
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The Canberra was a good aircraft in its day in a high altitude reconaissance role. As a bomber it was pretty much useless, as it could not carry the bomb load that Soviet and American aircraft could. During the Vietnam War, the Australian Airforce (RAAF) deployed Canberras to routinely bomb the Ho Chi Minh trail, over which munitions from China were trucked into Vietnam. The North Vietnamese never bothered too much about downing the Canberrras. They simply drove their trucks off the road and under the canopy when the Canberras were coming, the Canberras with their little bombs blew craters in the road, and then the Vietnamese got out their shovels and in a couple of hours filled the craters in and resumed their deliveries. The Vietnamese apparently thought that if they destroyed the limitted number of Canberras available, the Americans would take over and use really big bombs and make the road unusable.
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Obviously not. you can drive a car or throw a rock in any direction you please, can't you?
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: Yes, I've heard that story, but.... And just where were the RAF going to get that extra bomb from?
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I laughed at 7:34 when the narrator said a guy was a policeman in Australia, and a photo of a chap in a British police uniform was shown. Those archaic helmets were not used in Australia.
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There are some errors in this video. For example, at 1:34 the presenter states that "AN (ie one) (Rolls Royce) engine was sold to the Russians who reverse engineered it.." In fact, a number of Nene engines were sold to the Russians, together with a full set of technical drawings and parts specifications. The Russians did not need to reverse engineer an engine, as it was a full technology transfer contract. Its worth noting that at the time it was reasonable deal to do - Britain was bankrupt and needed all the foreign cash it could get, and the Nene was already obsolete. The Mig-15 the Russian-made Nenes were fitted to was successful not because of having a very good engine, it was because the Mig-15 was a very good aircraft design.
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@heywoodjablowme8120 Of course you can throw a rock backwards. I exercise my dog by throwing tennis balls for her. As she has learnt to look well ahead in front of me, I sometimes throw the ball backwards over my shoulder to trick her.
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@mybluebelly : It's not as simple as that. In WW2, especially in Britain, aircraft design was not that well engineered. The Lanc was really a delivery platform for about the same weight as the B17. But experiment showed that with overloading it 100%, it could still, JUST, get off the ground and eventually climb, IF the pilot had nerves of steel, made no mistakes, and the engines were in perfect tune. There were a lot of take-off accidents due to the overloading. The Brits were prepared to wear that, the Americans not. And the limits of what a B17 could do were more accurately known.
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@Boppy-B-B : Don't confuse aiming error due to British spy skullduggery with the weapon's basic accuracy. Don't forget that German bombers were often sent well off target due to British measures eg using fluent German speakers pretending to be German air controllers, and messing with the German crossed beam navigation system. The specification for the V-2 was a basic target accuracy of 1.5 km (circle 3 km diameter), more than adequate to hit cities. As time went on it was improved. Since it relied on internal gyros and not external radio beams as the He-111's did, the accuracy was reliable. 1.5 km may not sound very good, but He-111's were no better. British bombers were even worse - many times crews could not even find the right city.
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@kiwifruitpoo The incompetent US General in charge of the US effort in Vietnam, Gen Westmoreland, assigned responsibility for wrecking the Ho Chi Minh trail to the Australians, who used their useless Canberra bombers to churn up the dirt. It would have been difficult for the US to win in Vietnam, given they had no real support from the locals, but why the US put Westmoreland, a known idiot "rock painter" obsessed with statistics, is a bit of a mystery. With him in charge the US had no hope.
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This video is more accurate than other videos about the V1 on YouTube. But it still repeats the old nonsense about upsetting the V1 by using a fighter plane to tip the V1's wings. This story originated in war time miss-information. Most V1's never reached the target due to being shot up (as this video says), and this was by radar directed proximity fuzed anti-aircraft guns (the VT fuze). These were supplied by the USA and were secret. A cover story was required to hopefully prevent the Germans from realising there was some way to shoot the V1's and go look for what it could possibly be, as the standard British anti-aircraft guns were not much good against the high speed and small size of the V-1. To approach and tip a V1 flying at 640 km/hr with a fighter flying at 600 km/hr tops was of course something you could only do as a fluke. Another important factor, that prevented the V1's that did get through from doing their worst, was that the British had identified German spies that were supposed to report where the early V-1's hit. So they arranged for these spies to "discover" reports of V-1 damage, which had the correct number and times, but skewed the points of impact by a few tens of miles. This caused the German commanders to think the on-board robot navigation system (actually very accurate) was a dud, and they would be better off without it.
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@wcg19891 : The thread was about V2 rockets - that's what the original poster asked about, not NASA space missions. However, it is not true that you can only launch west - that's ridiculous. Sub-orbital rockets can go in any direction, for the same reason any mode of transport can go in any direction - it already has rotational inertial before launch. Further, it is not impossible to reach orbital velocity going west (or north or south), just harder, needing more missile complexity and fuel. When Australia at out Woomera station was testing British military missiles, ICBM's, and launching satelites (eg WreSat), they were sent north-westward - for the same reason NASA launches east - to avoid flying over populated areas. Here in Australia, our government is buying ICBM defence systems because North Korea is thought to have developed ICBM's just capable of reaching Australia - these would fly due south - because Australia is south of North Korea.
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Why was the Lanc so "successful"? Well, when it's an all-out war, and the only large 4-engine bombers you have is the Lancaster and the Hallifax, then it jolly well has to be forced successful, doesn't it? How do you define success? If success is lots of missions flown, then the Lanc was successful. If success is crippling the German war effort, the Lanc was nothing like as good as the B-17.
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@Hattonbank : I gave the facts. Look it up, under the Russian designation RD-45. The British prime minister Atlee approved the sale, upon recommendation by Minister for Trade Stafford Cripps. The contract, negotiated by Soviet engine leader Vladimir Klimov with Rolls Royce, was a technology transfer contract, sample engines plus all technical drawings and parts specifications. You haven't realised that such drawings and specifications have in themselves considerable value and were part of the price the USSR agreed to. The contract also required the USSR to pay a royalty fee on each engine they made. All up it meant Rolls Royce stood to gain a LOT of money. It happened that the Russians had some initial trouble making some parts - it took them a while to master certain metallurgical specifications, and ended up buying a total of 40 Nenes in order to meet their aircraft deadlines. It was subsequently discovered that the Russians ended up making perfomance improvements to the Nene/RD-45 and claimed this was a new model (VK-1 and VK-1F with afterburner) and thus no royalty need be paid. Worse (in a commercial sense), they did a similar technology transfer of the Nene design to China, who also put it into volume production, paying royalties to the USSR. All up, Rolls Royce estimated they were cheated out of 207 million pounds and tried to sue for it. They never got the money, only the amount specified in the contract for the sample Nenes, the drawings and specifications, and the royalties on the production of the initial RD-45's. It was the higher thrust VK-1's that ended up in volume production for fighters, not the Nene copies. You also need to realise that, at the time at any rate, the British Government didn't think it was selling jewels at all, and that judgment is probably valid. The Nene was at that time obsolete, offering a not very good performance with excessive fuel consumption. The Soviets were working on their own jet engine design after acquiring WW2 German knowhow, but were having trouble with it. It was cheaper to buy British knowhow, and they held Rolls Royce in high regard. As far as Rolls Royce was concerned, it was money for jam - a large bag of money for an engine they were otherwise unlikely to sell much of. If the British Government had blocked the sale, the Russians would have pushed ahead with their own design anyway, solved the problems, and ended up with a better engine. Don't forget, too, the the USSR had in operation a vast covert operation to pinch as much American aerospace drawings and specs as they could. Without the Nenes, they might have leapfrogged ahead with stolen American designs.
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