In article , Glenfiddich
writes
On 1 Jun 2004 06:23:49 -0700, (Prowlus) wrote:

Does anyone know why the allies didn't consider using their air
lauched rockets as air-to-air weapons during the war when the jets
started appearing? I thought it would have been a good idea to ward
off any attack from ME-262s or me-163s which were too fast to attack
with guns.

Did any of those WW2 aircraft rockets have any sort of guidance and
homing?

Since a direct hit on a fast-mover by an unguided rocket was and still
is VERY unlikely, the next question that comes to mind is whether WW2
era air-to-ground rockets had proximity fuses and fragmentation (or
better) warheads.

The air-ground rockets used by the Typhoon, Beaufighter, Mosquito, and
even the Swordfish, had a selection of warheads: 60 pound high explosive
shaped-charge for armoured land targets, and solid 25 pound armour
piercing for use against submarines (if these punched a hole in the hull
the U-boat crew could never get to the site of the hole to fix it so the
sub slowly sank). There was also a concrete one for practice.

Being air-ground they did not have proximity fuses, but interestingly,
post-war, the air-ground rocket was used in trials to build air-air
missiles. A heat detector was installed in an instruments package in
the nose and it was fired up a ramp towards a hot target mounted on a
tower. When the rocket passed the target it set off a flash bulb to
show the precise moment it had detected the hot spot. That was the easy
bit - finding an optical filter that would detect the target and ignore
the Sun took some time. There were also ground-based detectors that
were tested against low-flying Mosquitos to see if they could detect the
heat from the engine exhausts (they did). I saw some interesting
footage of the experiments some years ago.

Without those features, their battle effectiveness would have been,
at most, the psychological effect of near-misses.

'It is the most exhilarating thing in the world to be shot at - without
result.' W S Churchill.

Cheers,

Dave

--
Dave Eadsforth