ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne

52 The Hunt for Zero Point
the Brandenburgische Motorenwerke, had been bought by BMW from
Siemens in 1939. By the middle of the war, BMW-Bramo had 5,000 staff
working full-time on gas-turbine research alone—a discipline then
barely a decade old—and was ultimately responsible for the BMW 003
jet engine, the best turbojet of the day, which powered the Me 262, the
world's first operational jet fighter, and the Ar 234, the Luftwaffe's
advanced jet-propelled reconnaissance-bomber, another aircraft far
ahead of its time.
It was from Spandau, supposedly, that Klaus Habermohl, the second
disc engineer mentioned by Lusar, was recruited to the Schriever team.
Habermohl's job in Prague was to integrate the disc with a new and
radical form of power plant called the radial-flow gas-turbine, or RFGT.
Unlike Brown's electrogravitic motor, the RFGT was, at least, recognizable
technology by modern standards, if extraordinary. It was essentially
a jet engine. However, unlike a regular jet power plant, with its
compressors, combustion chambers and turbines mounted one behind
the other in what was basically a big tube, the RFGT formed part of the
airframe itself, with the whirling turbomachinery rotating around the
aircraft's centrally mounted cockpit. As such, "aircraft" did not adequately
describe what the machine actually looked like. There was only
one configuration to which an RFGT could possibly be adapted: that of
a flying disc or saucer.
By the autumn of 1944, the V3 is said to have been completed. With
German airfields under constant attack from Allied daylight bombing,
the prospect of a fighter or bomber that could take off and land vertically
from any dispersed site would have been exactly in line with Luftwaffe
requirements. However, due to "an administrative change," the V3
program was abandoned in favor of a further prototype, the V7, propulsion
coming from another experimental RFGT from BMW-Bramo.
The V7 supposedly had a diameter of 60—70 feet and a crew of two or
three.
Applying a crude rule of thumb, based on a rough estimate of the disc's
weight, Habermohl's ingenious RFGT would have had to have generated
around 10-15,000 pounds of thrust to have made the design of the
disc in any way viable. This was the machine that supposedly test-flew on
February 14 with Schriever and Habermohl at the controls, achieving
2,000 km/h in level flight.
The fastest aircraft of the day, the little rocket-powered Me 163,
struggled to attain half this speed.
Lusar's third and last German saucer scientist, Dr. Richard Miethe,
was supposedly working on another disc project at a subterranean facility