From Cobra to Triton: the US Navy's Bumblebee program

This seems to be the famous Cobra ramjet which was tested in 1945. IIRC it was test vehicle of the project Bumblebee to develop an anti-kamikaze missile for the US Navy.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~buzznau/bmblbee.html

http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/cobrabtv.htm
 
Here is another anti-Kamikaze rocket!
http://www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/app1/sam-n-2.html
 
How did they test such a ramjet? Back then were there even any supersonic wind-tunnels in the US or England?

Kendra Lesnick
 
Semiannual report on Project Bumblebee.

http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/c955072.pdf
 
KJ_Lesnick said:
How did they test such a ramjet? Back then were there even any supersonic wind-tunnels in the US or England?

Kendra Lesnick


Free flight test. Strap boosters on it to get it up to speed, and away you go. They would track the thing via kinetheodolites, and then a bunch of people with slide rules and calculating machines had to resolve the azimuth and elevation data from two or more of these (recorded on film as the missile was optically tracked) into three-dimensional position/time data that could then in turn be refined to yield performance details.


As electronics improved, on-board telemetry with increasing numbers of data channels became possible. Early test vehicles had to be recovered and the data (etched onto film in flight) hopefully recovered intact.


Peter Morton's Fire Across the Desert, a history of the Woomera Rocket Range, doesn't relate directly to this project (it's purely Anglo-Australian) but provides an excellent description of the whole range-testing process, including the way it was gradually automated over the years.
 
A very interesting diagram showing the evolution of the BUMBLEBEE program:
 

Attachments

  • Bumblebee.gif
    Bumblebee.gif
    143.3 KB · Views: 237
Triton would have been quite the impressive beast had they ever built it. Talos on steroids, and then some!!


Makes you wonder what sort of performance you would get out of a Talos-sized missile today.
 
And here's a picture showing the general configuration of the XPM test vehicles:
 

Attachments

  • XPM artwork.gif
    XPM artwork.gif
    211.8 KB · Views: 203
pathology_doc said:
Triton would have been quite the impressive beast had they ever built it. Talos on steroids, and then some!!


Makes you wonder what sort of performance you would get out of a Talos-sized missile today.

It's called Brahmos. ;) (Of course it could have been Fasthawk. . . )
 

Similar threads

Back
Top Bottom