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would be produced on this same site. 2 All of the most recognized aviation technology
designers, including enthusiasts of Bolkhovitinov’s most cutting-edge ideas,
believed that missile flights were for those who dreamed of interplanetary journeys.
Our task for the next ten years was to use the propeller and internal combustion
engine as effectively as possible!
Getting down to our new work, I commandeered a small room in an old Fotolet
building and obtained the right to establish contracts for the development and
supply of elements for an alternating current system for the future bomber.
I selected the electric machine laboratory of the V. I. Lenin All-Union Electrical
Engineering Institute (VEI) as my primary supplier.The laboratory’s scientific
director was Academician Klavdiy Ippolitovich Shenfer, a world-class specialist in
the field of electric machines. During our first meeting, he immediately appreciated
both the problematic nature and the great potential of the subject. Shenfer
refused to personally participate in the work, explaining that he was loaded down
with research on asynchronous electric machines, but he proposed that I give a
report for the “youthful” contingent of the laboratory.The laboratory engineers,
especially machine designer Boris Dmitriyevich Sadovskiy and machine design
specialist Teodor Soroker, were very interested in my proposals. A year after our
joint collaboration had begun, I was convinced that their creative input would give
my fuzzy dream real definition. The laboratory collective developed generators,
electric motors, dynamos, drive mechanisms in the form of reduction gears with
built-in motors, remote switches, and many other devices.
Looking from today’s perspective at the system we conceived in 1938, one must
admit that on the whole it was an interesting and absorbing technical adventure.
We were faced with solving hundreds of very difficult technical problems, some of
which to this day have yet to be satisfactorily realized.
Having selected a triple-phase alternating current system with a frequency of
500 Hz and a voltage of 48 V, we spent a long time inventing stabilization methods.We
devised and tested a voltage stabilizer relatively quickly. Frequency stabilization
gave rise, so it seemed, to insurmountable difficulties.The generators were
driven by aircraft engines, the RPMs of which varied over a very broad range.
Given a nominal frequency of 500 Hz, the frequency of the current at the generator
output had to be maintained with an error no greater than ±10 Hz.
How were we to achieve this? We studied a multitude of ideas.We settled on a
hydraulic converter, which, having a variable RPM rate to the input shaft, ensured
a strictly constant rotation rate at the output.
The most surprising aspect of this story was that primary prototypes of the main
assemblies were not only designed, but also fabricated and tested in the laboratory.
2. Plant No. 293 eventually housed OKB-2 (or later MKB Fakel), the organization that, under General
Designer Petr Dmitriyevich Grushin, designed and built several generations of the Soviet Union’s best anti-aircraft
and anti-ballistic missiles, including the missile system that shot down Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 aircraft in 1960.
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