Chapter 71 Project
Yannick easily solved the problem raised by Obert, which made Obert admire him even more.
"Your Highness, you are a genius. This is a good idea. But this method can't hit too far, right?" After all, even the best pilots can only detect enemy aircraft 30 kilometers away at most. How to control the V2 with a range of 300 kilometers? And the weight of the wire itself is also a big problem! I'm afraid it will affect the flight of the missile after exceeding a certain length!
Yannick nodded. "I just provide ideas. This wired guidance method can be said to be hindered by the wire. It can only be used for short-range missiles to deal with enemy tanks, bunkers and the like. When optical fiber is mass-produced, it will be used instead of wires. At that time, it will be no problem to deal with enemy bombers." The weight, length and signal attenuation of metal wires limit the range of missiles, limiting their range to 2000-3000 meters, and the combat targets are mainly anti-tank and anti-bunker.
The conductor of wired guidance in later generations is optical fiber, which is favored for its advantages such as light weight (a thousand-meter copper wire weighs 3kg, while an optical fiber of more than ten kilometers weighs only a few hundred grams), good concealment (the laser beam of image data and control instructions is transmitted inside the optical fiber, and there is no light or electromagnetic signal radiation to the outside, which has extremely strong attack concealment), and long control distance (extended distance can reach 60 kilometers).
Speaking of "optical fiber", few people in later generations probably don't know this thing. In later generations, the thing most closely related to optical fiber is broadband. Even if you just go online, you know that optical fiber has a faster transmission speed than traditional network cables. After all, optical fiber uses light to transmit signals, and the speed of light is the fastest speed known so far.
Some people may think that "optical fiber", which sounds high-end, is a high-tech thing that has only been developed in recent decades. In fact, as early as 1887, a scientist first created an optical fiber more than 2 meters long.
Manufacturing optical fiber can be said to be both easy and difficult.
It is easy because optical fiber is glass (of course there is also plastic optical fiber), which is the optical glass installed on your windows.
It is difficult because this optical glass must be made pure enough.
How pure is it? The glass windows at home are transparent. Usually, the thicker the glass, the less transparent it is, because there are impurities in the glass. Even if the glass used for optical fiber is several kilometers thick, you can still see the object through this glass.
When this purity is achieved, it is drawn into optical fiber.
Of course, Yannick will not ignore this strategic key product. Unfortunately, it has not yet broken through the bottleneck of equipment and process, and cannot be mass-produced. But he believes that it will only take a few years.
"Since wired guidance has defects, we can study wireless guidance methods. For example, use radio or television guidance. Install a camera and signal transmitter at the front end of the warhead of the rocket, and then continuously send signals. Put a TV and receiver in the control station to receive the signal sent by the camera, and the operator controls the missile while watching the TV screen."
This is not an excessive request. You must know that the world's earliest wireless guided weapon was the "Fritz-X" of Germany in World War II.
The total weight of the "Fritz-X" bomb is 1,570 kilograms, the length of the bomb is 2 meters, the maximum diameter of the bomb body is 562 mm, and it uses a cross-shaped wing with a wingspan of 6 meters. The combined control wing at the tail of the missile adopts a ring structure, with 4 radio-controlled rudders and 5 light tubes at the back, so that the pilot can accurately determine the position of the "Fritz-X" wireless guided bomb and adjust its course.
The TV guidance system also appeared in World War II. The earliest TV-guided weapon used was the Hs294D? air-to-ground guided missile used by Germany in World War II.
As for their actual combat performance and results, it remains to be discussed, but they are indeed the ancestors of modern guided missiles in later generations.
However, both methods have defects. The anti-interference performance of radio guidance is poor, and it is easy to be interfered by the enemy and lose control. As one of the radio guidance, the TV-guided missile not only has all the shortcomings mentioned above, but also can only work during the day and is greatly affected by meteorological conditions; in the case of low visibility such as smoke, dust, fog, etc., the combat effectiveness is reduced. Moreover, the equipment on the missile is relatively complex and the guidance system cost is relatively high.
But no matter what, he also wants to develop air defense missiles. Just thinking about the bomber force of the United States that covers the sky and the sun makes people's backs cold.
In the middle and late stages of World War II, Germany's anti-aircraft artillery force had already faced a crisis, because the results achieved by the existing anti-aircraft artillery were completely disproportionate to the shells consumed. It is estimated that for each enemy plane shot down, the German army needs to consume 16,000 88mm shells, which is equivalent to 6,000 105mm shells or 3,000 128mm shells.
Anyone with a little foresight will foresee that with the development of technology and the increase in aircraft speed, the situation will continue to deteriorate. If surface-to-air missiles are used, one missile can be exchanged for one aircraft, and the combat effectiveness will undoubtedly be greatly improved. You must know that today's aircraft are not the jet aircraft that come and go without a trace in later generations.
However, Germany in the original time and space did not rashly adopt this advanced air defense method even though it had developed a variety of surface-to-air missiles such as "Gentian", "Fire Lily Butterfly", "Waterfall", "Butterfly", and "Rhine Daughter". Because this transformation involves huge risks, not only the change of the weapon itself, but also the change of combat methods. It is notable that the existing air defense mode has changed from a prediction mode to a radar guidance mode. Such a change involves countless technical difficulties. Such risks have forced the Germans to act cautiously.
Yannick believes that as long as they speed up research and development, they can deploy these air defense weapons before the Allies bomb Germany on a large scale.
The effect of these air defense missiles may not be satisfactory, but no matter how poor their accuracy is, they are absolutely fatal in the face of dense box-shaped formations of bombers. If the fleet dares to disperse, the German fighters will definitely teach the Americans how to behave. At that time, under the triple interception of air defense missiles, proximity fuze anti-aircraft shells, and high-altitude interceptors, as many of those so-called air fortresses as come will be shot down.
"I think unless new technology emerges, these two missiles will not have any qualitative leaps in the short term. The research department is divided into three groups. The first group will continue to find ways to improve these two missiles, the second group will study air-to-ground, anti-sea missiles, and the third group will start studying sounding rockets."
The current Rocket Science Academy is full of talents. Not to mention local scientists such as Wernher von Braun, Hubertus Straughold, Ludwig Plant, etc., there are also many talents absorbed from abroad.
Sergei Pavlovich Korolev of the Soviet Union (because of Yannick's interference, accidents occurred from time to time in his laboratory, and dozens of people died in the last explosion. The authorities directly sent several responsible persons to Siberia and permanently banned such research), German intelligence personnel secretly took him to Germany. Unexpectedly, this guy is a diehard and refuses to cooperate. It took more than a year of lobbying with both soft and hard tactics before he agreed to serve Germany.
Scientists such as Robert Herzig Goddard and Theodore von Karman, the father of space rockets, were "abducted" to Germany to participate in the development of rockets. Americans today probably don't even know what fuel is used in rockets, let alone complex scientific and technological projects such as navigation, rocket engines, and materials.