Originally posted by Exuberant1
reply to post by punkinworks
I believe that the Wehrmacht used fuel-air shells at Kursk and a few other places where they made us of their super mortars and railguns.
The Germans' "super mortars" weren't particularly super (unless you're a model builder) compared to more conventional artillery. They were good
at reducing very heavy concrete fortifications, but unfortunately for the Germans, the Allies weren't in the habit of building those.
As for 'railguns', I'm not normally much of a 'terminology Nazi'...but given the existence of railguns (electromagnetic artillery like the
systems currently under development by the US Navy and others) and railroad artillery (like the German K-5 or "Dora"). I'm fairly certain that
there weren't any German railguns, and I don't think there was much (if any) railroad artillery used at Kursk. I could easily be wrong about that,
as I'm more of a navy buff than an artillery person.
But I am also of the mind that the Germans were much further advanced than the general public will ever accept.
Based on what?
We dropped an untested bomb on Nagasaki. We never tested Uranium bombs before.
I believe that the allies may have had access to test data regarding a German uranium bomb test. This is why the allies took the risk of airmailing
Japan enough Uranium to build a bomb... because it wasn't a risk to those in the know.
The "Little Boy" type device (a gun barrel device based on U-235) didn't need to be tested. It had one moving part (one of the two 'slugs' of
uranium), and was based on very well-understood physics ("Put "X" kilos of U-235 in a mass, and there will be an uncontrolled chain reaction").
Thus, testing wasn't considered necessary. The risk of the Japanese recovering enough U-235 from a failed initiation to do anything with was
considered negligible, since even a failed initiation would've scattered the stuff over a fairly wide area in very small bits. The device's
conventional explosive train detonated at ~5,000 feet, so any 'crash debris' would be fairly spread out.
The "Fat Man" type device (plutonium implosion), on the other hand, was a much more 'theoretical' proposition. It was known that increasing the
density of a radioactive metal could lower the critical mass...making what had been a sub-critical sphere into a somewhat less stable object.
Unfortunately, the implosion idea couldn't be tested on small scales by "tickling the dragon's tail"...it was an all-or-nothing event that
required extreme violence to initiate...thus the need for a test article, and the now-famous Trinity test.
*snipped plug for "Reich of the Black Sun".*
