Video might be of interest. Can't speak to its accuracy, but at least it doesn't seem too insane.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfio0VHXUmw
Schnellboots
- Thread starter Orionblamblam
- Start date
Yep, insane.
The VS5 was supposed to be an improvement on displacement hulls...but the inventor seems to have overlooked that the part of the boat below the water was...a displacement hull. And, not a very well-conceived one, since it relied on a balance of hydrodynamic forces against the submerged-hull top and bottom curvatures to maintain a cruise depth. But, this balance was subject to the varying hydrodynamic pressure as the boat passed through waves, with a time delay due to the vessel's mass and therefore flotation inertia. This resulted in a pitch oscillation frequency depending on the wave spacing, and a critical speed for resonance. Truly a horrible idea for design of a stable vessel. Plus, in the end, even more drag than the best of the conventional vessels it was supposed to improve on.
The hydrofoil designs, like all hydrofoils before them, had the fundamental shortcoming of not being safe at high speed beyond a sea state that either would cause the main hull to hit a wavetop at high speed and a significant angle to the wave direction, or cause one front strut to hit a waveface at high speed before the other side's front strut hit that wave...in either case, resulting in the vessel mass being subject to an overturning force that, given that the center of mass was well above the height of the foils, tended to establish a rolling oscillation. If the waves were high enough and the vessel was moving fast enough, this could result in the vessel tipping sideways off the outer foil, and crashing at speed onto its side. Hydrofoils were then, and are now, best suited for lakes, rivers and very protected bays in calm conditions. But, that's not a practical limitation for warfighting.
And the pulsejet boats were dumb for the simple enough reason that the Argus pulsejet engine relied on the inlet ram effect to ingest enough air to develop a useful level of thrust, and the critical speed for that was about 150-200 kph. The V1 launcher threw V1s into the air at about 240 kph, so that system worked fine. But, trials of the Argus engine on a truck were failures, and its attempted use on the Tornado schnellboot was a failure as well, because it didn't develop useful thrust in the achievable speed range for a land or water vehicle.
The VS5 was supposed to be an improvement on displacement hulls...but the inventor seems to have overlooked that the part of the boat below the water was...a displacement hull. And, not a very well-conceived one, since it relied on a balance of hydrodynamic forces against the submerged-hull top and bottom curvatures to maintain a cruise depth. But, this balance was subject to the varying hydrodynamic pressure as the boat passed through waves, with a time delay due to the vessel's mass and therefore flotation inertia. This resulted in a pitch oscillation frequency depending on the wave spacing, and a critical speed for resonance. Truly a horrible idea for design of a stable vessel. Plus, in the end, even more drag than the best of the conventional vessels it was supposed to improve on.
The hydrofoil designs, like all hydrofoils before them, had the fundamental shortcoming of not being safe at high speed beyond a sea state that either would cause the main hull to hit a wavetop at high speed and a significant angle to the wave direction, or cause one front strut to hit a waveface at high speed before the other side's front strut hit that wave...in either case, resulting in the vessel mass being subject to an overturning force that, given that the center of mass was well above the height of the foils, tended to establish a rolling oscillation. If the waves were high enough and the vessel was moving fast enough, this could result in the vessel tipping sideways off the outer foil, and crashing at speed onto its side. Hydrofoils were then, and are now, best suited for lakes, rivers and very protected bays in calm conditions. But, that's not a practical limitation for warfighting.
And the pulsejet boats were dumb for the simple enough reason that the Argus pulsejet engine relied on the inlet ram effect to ingest enough air to develop a useful level of thrust, and the critical speed for that was about 150-200 kph. The V1 launcher threw V1s into the air at about 240 kph, so that system worked fine. But, trials of the Argus engine on a truck were failures, and its attempted use on the Tornado schnellboot was a failure as well, because it didn't develop useful thrust in the achievable speed range for a land or water vehicle.
The boats may well have been. I was saying that the *video* didn't seem to be insane. No claims of these things working better or differently than physics would allow. for instance. Sadly, that simple bit of "meh, I guess it's reported reasonably" is something of an achievement these days.
Hey, if it wasn't for unclear communications, there'd be almost no communications on SPF whatsoever.
The German hydrofoils were undeniably cool. As were a lot of the things they had. But you know what wins wars? Not the cool stuff. The stuff that works wins wars. "You've got snazzy Hugo Boss uniforms and neato high-tech stuff that breaks down all the time? That's cool. Darn, all I have are a bajillion jeeps and PO'ed Russians in uniforms made out of potato sacks. Let's see how it plays out!"
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