ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne
ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne
ScienceDirect - Technol Rep Tohoku Univ ... - Garryck Osborne
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NICK COOK 55<br />
flying bomb designed to knock down enemy aircraft. The other was<br />
manned, but flew in anger only once before hostilities ended.<br />
The unpiloted version was called the Feuerball (Fireball) and it<br />
blended a number of highly advanced technologies.<br />
"In the autumn of 1944," Vesco wrote, "in Oberammergau in Bavaria,<br />
the OBF—an experimental center run by the Luftwaffe—had completed<br />
a series of researches into electrical apparatus capable of interfering with<br />
the operation of an engine up to a maximum distance of about a hundred<br />
feet by producing intense electromagnetic fields."<br />
In parallel, a separate effort was under way by the Germans to produce<br />
a "proximity radio interference" device capable of jamming or spoofing<br />
Allied radio and radar systems. Put these two technologies into a small,<br />
circular, armored airframe "powered by a special turbojet engine, also flat<br />
and circular and more or less resembling the shell of a tortoise" and "a<br />
highly original flying machine was born."<br />
Radio-controlled at the moment of takeoff, the machine was steered<br />
toward Allied bomber streams by a ground operator, whereupon it automatically<br />
latched onto their slipstreams, "attracted by their exhaust flames,<br />
and approached close enough without collision to wreck their radar gear."<br />
And then came the detail. The Fireball was first constructed at an<br />
aircraft plant at Wiener Neustadt, south of Vienna, with the help of the<br />
Flugfunk Forschungsanstalt of Oberpfaffenhoffen (FFO), an aircraft<br />
electronics firm near Munich. Hermann Goering, Hitler's deputy,<br />
inspected progress on the weapon "a number of times," hoping that the<br />
principle of the Fireball could also be used to produce "an offensive<br />
weapon capable of revolutionizing the whole field of aerial warfare.<br />
"The fiery halo around the perimeter—caused by a very rich fuel<br />
mixture—and the chemical additives that interrupted the flow of<br />
electricity [in Allied aircraft] by overionizing the atmosphere in the<br />
vicinity of the plane, generally around the wing tips or tail surfaces,<br />
subjected the H2S radar on the plane to the action of powerful<br />
electrostatic fields and electromagnetic impulses (the latter generated by<br />
large klystron radio tubes protected with anti-shock and anti-heat<br />
armor). Since a metal arc carrying an oscillating current of the proper<br />
frequency—equal, that is, to the frequency used by the radar stationcan<br />
cancel the blips (return signals from the target), the Feuerball was<br />
almost undetectable by the most powerful American radar of the time,<br />
despite its nighttime visibility."<br />
Once again, I pictured the desperation felt by Schlueter as his radar<br />
operator, Meiers, failed to register the orbs of light ahead of the Black<br />
Widow on the SCR540.