Mario Zippermayr and his work during WWII

The conical shape inside the ball is probably the "Feuerwirbel"- Fire Whirlwind- mentioned in the biography. It seems like the "Zippermayr bomb" is the first air-fuel bomb in the world. But it is interesting that at today's FAE there is no such phenomenon.
And the "brain-cells destroying weapon" mentioned in one of the American documents I posted here earlier is probably the Schallkanone, that was to be developed at Lofer, in a facility called "Hochtal". Zippermayr was a direcor of the "Talstation" facility that was also near Lofer.
 
Its a shame this topic died. Is there enyone who have some more documentation, and am i the only one who cant see the picture posted?
 
Any chance that someone misunderstood the European use of a comma as a decimal point and turned metres into kilometres? Or are kilometres specifically mentioned?


(Edited to fix a typo)
 
viro said:
Its a shame this topic died. Is there enyone who have some more documentation, and am i the only one who cant see the picture posted?

I suspect the pictures are no longer available since the last post was a bit over a year ago.

From skimming the thread and actually reading some of the various "sources" on the subject, (hell Scott, SOMEONE has to read this drek to see if anything "interesting" is actually in there :) I'm of the opinion that the whole "coal" fuel-air bomb is a serious case of mistaken numbers and rationilizations. I happen to have worked with/on the FAE during my stint in the AF and nothing I learned about how explosives, (and explosions) leads me to believe the effects could have been anywhere near what was "described" given the technices used. FAEs require certain factors to work properly and just releasing a "cloud" and igniting it simply ain't going to work.

pathology_doc said:
Any chance that someone misunderstood the European use of a comma as a decimal point and turned metres into kilometres? Or are kilometres specifically mentioned?
Most materials I've seen "quote" Kilometers but the source material is cited to be recorded (written) reports so I highly suspect that's possible.

Randy
 
The thing is, I have "seen" the pics he posted, and while the numbers are absolutely ridiculous, this "rumor" was investigated by both BIOS and CIOS and i would love to get the pics back.

And it is possible to make such an explosion. When there is enough oxygen around dust, it will ignite. It have happened in some mils in USA, but with flour instead of coal dust. In Otto Skorzenys book you can read about how they destroyed a Russian city with liquid air rocket for their rocket artillery. A funny read, but not possible:)
 
viro said:
And it is possible to make such an explosion. When there is enough oxygen around dust, it will ignite. It have happened in some mils in USA, but with flour instead of coal dust.

It's easy to make a coal or flour-dust fire. What's needed is to make a coal-dust *detonation.* Short physics lesson: if you throw a handfull of flamable powder into the air towards a lit flame, you will get a nice impressive fireball. This is - or at least was, before society turned completely cowardly - done in many a middle-school chemistry lab. While the fireball is impressive, and might set some stuff on fire, its usefulness as a weapon is *seriously* limited. It is not an "explosion" in any meaningful sense... the flamefront propagation rate is well below the speed of sound. There is no damaging shockwave. And while there's fire, most of the fire it "up there" away from the target, and the bulk of the heat would be transmitted to the target via radiation. In contrast, a napalm attack would spread the fire directly *on* the target, transmitting heat via conduction. This is *vastly* more effective. The same amount of thermal energy in a napalm attack that may convert a human target into a charcoal briquette might, in a coal-dust fire, simply burn off his eyebrows and set his shirt on fire.

Where grain silos become interesting is that they are enclosed volumes that can, however briefly, contain pressure. This means that when the fire starts, the increased air temperature causes the air pressure to increase, and with nowhere for the hot air to go, the air pressure spikes. And as air pressure goes up, the burning rate also goes up, which drives air pressure up... a nice circular death spiral of increasing pressure and burn rate, until the grain silo explodes. This is the same basic process that turns a non-explosive pile of burning black powder into a pipe bomb.

Now if you want to weaponize coal dust, you have to do more than release a cloud and set fire to it. You have to release a cloud and cause it to *detonate.* This can be done, but it takes effort. Basicaly, you need to set off not a match, but a series of initiating high explosives. A *true* high explosive (RDX, frex) will, deployed properly, set up a sharp shock wave that passes through the unburnt cloud of coal. At the shock wave boundary, air pressure can be incredibly high (thousands to millions of psi); this increased air pressure will, as in the case described above, cause the burn rate to be incredibly high. If the air pressure is high enough to drive the coal dust fire burn rate high enough to be supersonic, then the coal dust can be said to be truly detonating, and will add its own energy to the shock wave, and it becomes self-propagating.

To get *really* nasty, your weaponized coal dust bomb needs to set off not one high explosive initiator, but a series of them. Preferably a ring of small bombs around the cloud of dust. Done properly, they will cause the cloud to detonate from the outside inward; in the center where the shockwaves meet you can get some truly astonishing temperatures and pressures. The sort that cause lungs to be ripped out through the mouth and turned inside out and then set on fire.

Gettign the initiator right is, I think, the big challenge with fuel-air explosives.

This sort of weapon is great for "soft" targets - buildings, aircraft, people. Not really very effective against hardened targets like bunkers or tanks.
 
Thx for that!

But all I want is those pics and some extra info if you got some... But that description was awesome thx
 
Hi folks, here is my artwork about the Pfeil Flugzeug : http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,16995.0/all.html

hope you enjoy

Regards
 
Re: Zippermayr Pfeil (Arrow)

Orionblamblam said:
OK, here's the scan from the Simon book, along with my own attempt at reconstruction. Feel free to point and laugh... there's every reason to see this attempt as crap, especially the top view. There may be some sweepback on the leading edge, but it's hard to be sure.

Obviously the tail is missing, because it's not shown in the available photo.

As much as I'm a sucker for secret German projects - Its not that convincing as a secret jet plane is it - when viewing the clearer image?

The truss work looks more akin to a WWI box frame fuselage (with wire diagonal bracing to be added?) than even a WWII era approach with diagonal truss bracing ?

The "jet pipe" looks more like a section of rounded/feared fuselage - there inst any obvious place for an engine (if the cockpit is to the right of the object)? - which *may* continue forward, but is obscured by the jig.
 
Fig. 67 looks more like a ground mock-up. As for diagonal bracing ..... the skin carries those loads in a semi-monocoque structure.

That airframe might reach supersonic speeds ..... straight down.

OTOH I highly doubt that that ultra low aspect ratio wing could land at a high angle of attack. Many people have experimented with low aspect ratio wings, but few succeeded. The closest are sharply-swept delta wings on supersonic airplanes. (e.g. Concorde airliner). At high angles of attack, the entire leading edge acts like a huge wing tip generating massive, conical vortexes. Those votexes generate plenty of lift, but also massive amounts of drag. Concorde has to be flown at precise air speeds to avoid getting too deep into the “drag bucket.” .... because it could not power its way out of the drag bucket.
OTOH delta-winged fighters can use after-burners to power their way out of the drag bucket.

Pfeil’s ultra low aspect ratio wing would generate massive amounts of drag, but little lift at high angles of attack.
 
Seems that Zippermayr was not the only one who worked on coal dust / fuel-air / FAE bombs.
Patent Nr / Veröffentlichungsnummer: DE680483
Title: Fliegerbombe für Kohlenstaubexplosionen
Inventor: Kurt von Haken
Year: 06.04.1933
The patent shows a sketch of a coal dust parachute bomb.

https://depatisnet.dpma.de/DepatisNet/depatisnet?action=einsteiger

https://patents.google.com/patent/DE680483C
 

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I know this is a very old thread, but did someone saved ALL the pictures posted by mato.dds on the first page?

Thank you in advance!
 
Seems that Zippermayr was not the only one who worked on coal dust / fuel-air / FAE bombs.
Patent Nr / Veröffentlichungsnummer: DE680483
Title: Fliegerbombe für Kohlenstaubexplosionen
Inventor: Kurt von Haken
Year: 06.04.1933
The patent shows a sketch of a coal dust parachute bomb.


That parachute has odd vents around it. Those vents look like they are designed to spin the parachute. Are those vents supposed to spin the parachute and help spread bomb contents?
 
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I have been able to translate parts of the above. The Zippermayr aircraft was 3/4 complete by the end of the war. He offered it to the Americans. Fortunately, that situation included a few names for further research.

"It was planned to use the dust explosions for air defense against incoming bomber groups, whereby numerous simultaneous smaller explosions were considered more promising than few extended ones. Combat should be carried out by shooting up rocket swarms and simultaneously igniting them at the level of the enemy organization. A pile explosion in the air should be created on the surface of the earth, similar to the bomb carpet. The ignition would have taken place from the ground on the radio path.

"In view of the importance of the research carried out by the laboratory during the war, the laboratory and the major part of the staff were commissioned by the inter-allied commission Kpt. GG in the first days of June 1945. Mc. Gill, G-2 Division, SHAEF, banned. For Dr. Zippermayr, who was still at the “Interrogation camp” in Augsburg at the time, and instructions were given for his employees to be prepared for questioning by the technical commissions of the USA and Great Britain. Upon his return on June 20, 1945, the survey was conducted by the responsible commissions of the Allied Forces, Kpt.R.E. Work from 2677th Regiment OSS of the U.S. Army and Kpt. F. Greenlee USAF."


Too bad the recent writings about the OSS are so sanitized. I recommend that researchers attempt to locate SHAEF documents for June 1945.
 
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If I recall correctly, one result of the research that was just about ready for production when the war ended was the so-called 'Hurricane Cannon' a rather nasty anti-aircraft shell filled with coal dust and compatible with standard 88 mm (8.8 cm) anti-aircraft guns. If it had gone into production, Allied bomber losses would have likely been even more severe than they were back at the high water mark of the German air defences, possibly even affecting the exact outcome of the war if they had somehow managed to complete it earlier, say, back in late 1943).
 
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As OBB noted above to get an FAE (or the coal dust one being discussed) to work effectivly you have to 'contain' the explosion enough to get a feedback loop or it's just a big, mostly harmless fireball. FAE's do this by igniting the OUTSIDE of the cloud, (something none of the shown devices look to do) which then compress' the cloud to a point where the interior auto-ignites resulting in an explosion.

Now note I wrote "mostly harmless" on purpose because as OBB noted such a fireball WILL causes flamable materials to ignite if caught inside and surprise, surprise a heavily laden bomber has a LOT of flamable material onboard when in flight. And it is historically noted that the Allies did in fact lose some bombers to "deployed clouds of firedamp" which exploded when an aircraft flew into it. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firedamp, while I seriously doubt it was 'methane' I would buy a cloud of coal dust deployed by an anti-aircraft shell) The problem as keeps being noted is getting the RIGHT mix at the right time for such a thing to work and frankly while you MIGHT get lucky and get a couple aicraft in a box with such a shot your chances are really. really low and it would be more effective to use conventional AA shells instead.
(If it's not clear you have to stop shooting regular AA for the cloud trick to work since the regular AA shell blasts will disrupt the cloud formation and have a high chance of igniting the cloud prematurly)

Randy
 
Experimental anti-aircraft shells were developed and fired. These were observed and reported by Allied aircrew. Contrary to opinion, the Germans worked diligently to deploy what they could till the end of the war.
 
In addition to what has been mentioned on this thread, here is some information on Zippermayer's work in "Hitler's Terror Weapons. From V-I To Vimana. Geoffrey Brooks. 2002.
 

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In addition to what has been mentioned on this thread, here is some information on Zippermayer's work in "Hitler's Terror Weapons. From V-I To Vimana. Geoffrey Brooks. 2002.
Very interesting, this is new to me the Zippermayr tornado bomb. Ok but what advantage after that in the last years of the war.
 
Recently bought all three of Henry Stevens' books on...well, conspiracy-theory secret Nazi shenanigans (one covers flying saucers, naturally, one is the cited secret inventions mentioned upthread somewhere, and one is about alleged postwar survival of a Nazi "Third Power" with the advanced technology discussed in the first two). Now, disclaimer before I pick up the reputation of a nutjob, I read this stuff for fun, not because I actually believe it. It's like Iron Sky, entertaining but mostly nonsense.

Now, of the three, the secret inventions one (Hitler's Suppressed And Still-Secret Weapons, Science And Technology) is probably the closest to being reliable in that it does cite a heap of Allied intelligence reports. The issue there is that most of them are from 1945-1946 when intelligence offices were still trying to sort through the colossal amount of info coming out of Germany, and many of the fantastical things are single-sentence bullet points on rather large lists, or condensed reports from interviews with POWs and scientists. If there's specific things anybody wants looked up, reply to me here and I'll see what I can do.

PS: while it's semi-credible in citing real documentation, the author...the guy doesn't know his ass from his elbow, as we say around here. There's a chapter on nipolit, which from a rather cursory Google search is a rigid polymer explosive developed late in the war and not really a great mystery. That's presented with the following CIOS document, which is scanned really poorly in that Google Books link and reproduced in slightly less awful phone-scan quality here:
QmqNUku.jpg

Now, I don't know what the hell he's on about with nuclear thermal V-2 rocket engines in that first half, and "explosive building material" is completely misinterpreted, but what truly cracked me up is the CIOS report and following page talking about an "undefined" material called...PETN. Pentaerythritol tetranitrate, one of the most common components in plastic explosives, and he's got no idea what it is. Hell, I'm not anywhere remotely near an expert on explosives, but that composition page is enough to tell exactly what nipolit is. 35% nitrocellulose, 30% diethylene glycol dinitrate (DEGN). 0.75% stabilizer, 0.05% magnesium, 0.1% graphite/carbon and 35% PETN, that's a triple-base propellant for artillery use.
 
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