Sunday 27 January 2019

Things I couldn't confirm for the new post

1. "Walter Riedel was a talented engineer but his lack of academic qualifications led to conflicts with the graduate engineers on the rocket team. Confusingly, he was replaced by Walther Riedel."

2. Von Braun and Dornberger invented the modern method of RnD development when all your technology is new. Sort of makes sense, I guess, but seems implausible considering some of the other advanced engineering projects happening at the time.

3. At some point Von Braun and the boys were drinking and he said to a Gestapo agent that he wanted to make rockets for spaceflight, not for the Nazis, and von Braun was subsequently arrested. While this is reported in a few places, the date changes: sometimes it is 1943, sometimes it is 1944. As to how von Braun got out, Dornberger points out von Braun is indispensable to the rocket projects, and he is released.

4. When the V-2 was being developed, as a ignition-cutoff timing mechanism it used a radar triggered signal from the ground. The staff saw this as a prototype mechanism only; later the accelerometer-based method was used for cutoff. But, one unit of missile launchers was using a remote triggered signal to improve accuracy; the most accurate V-2 attacks are reckoned to be the attacks on a bridge the Americans captured across the Rhine in 1945. I can't figure out if this is some *other* radar guided system, or if it is the old development one, because somebody figured out the worries of Allied jamming were overblown.