Shipboard Bomarc Weapon Sysytem Query

[Cobra]

Hey Guys, i was doing some surfing on Google when a Question Hit me:had the Bomarc Missile ever been looked at or Considered for mounting on US Navy ships as a Sam System for Shooting down Soviet Bombers? it's a Question i've been wondering about for a Long,Long time. think a Bomarc Sam System would work as a WHIF? what say you?  Thanks for looking.Dan

[Maverick]

Dan, given the Bomarc was designed as a long-range weapon system, designed to take out bombers beyond the borders of the US, I would have issues with seeing it working onboard a ship.  Add to that, 15000lbs weight, 46 ft length and you wouldn't be loading many aboard the ship, unless it was a carrier.  I guess one might consider it as a CAP type weapon to protect the carrier group from bombers dropping anti-ship missiles, but you'd have to have either nuke warheads (not really 'nice') or a lot of them to protect a battle group.

Regards,

Mav

[Hobbes]

I agree. The Navy initially used the Talos long-range SAM, with these specs:
Length (w/o booster)    6.40 m (21 ft); booster: 3.35 m (11 ft)
Wingspan   2.80 m (110 in)
Finspan   2.05 m (81 in)
Diameter   0.71 m (28 in); booster: 0.76 m (30 in)
Weight (w/o booster)   1540 kg (3400 lb); booster: 1990 kg (4400 lb)

Pretty big, but still half the weight of Bomarc. Talos was only carried on cruisers.

http://www.okieboat.com/Talos%20history.html

[KJ_Lesnick]

Hobbes

According to this, the US Navy built a supersonic wind-tunnel to test the Bumblebee design out.  If the USN had a supersonic wind-tunnel in this time frame, why didn't they use it to evaluate the D-558 or the X-1?

[Hobbes]

this page tells the history of high-speed wind tunnel testing in the US.

This section deals with the X-1:

The careers of these two people would come together for the development of the Bell X-1 in the 1940s. Kotcher's proposal, drafted during the period May-August 1939, was a response to Major General Henry H. "Hap" Arnold's request for an investigation of advanced military aircraft in the future. The proposal contained a plan for a high-speed flight research program. Kotcher pointed out the unknown aspects of the transonic gap, and the problems associated with the compressibility burble as elucidated by the NACA, and concluded that the next important step was a full-scale flight research program.37 The Army Air Corps did not immediately respond to this proposal.

Meanwhile, back at Langley, the idea of a high-speed research airplane was gaining momentum. By the time the United States entered World War II in December 1941, John Stack had studied the behavior of the flow in wind tunnels when the flow in the test section was near or at Mach one. He found that when a model was mounted in the flow, the flow field in the test section essentially broke down, and any aerodynamic measurements were worthless. He concluded that the successful development of such transonic wind tunnels was a problem of Herculean proportions, and was far into the future. In order to learn about the aerodynamics of transonic flight, the only recourse appeared to be a real airplane that would fly in that regime. Therefore, during several visits by Dr. George Lewis, NACA's Director of Aeronautical Research, Stack seized the opportunity to mention the idea. Lewis, who liked Stack and appreciated the talent he brought to the NACA, was not immediately partial to the idea of a research airplane. But in early 1942, he left a crack in the door. In Hansen's words: "He left Stack with the idea, however, that some low-priority, back-of-the-envelope estimates to identify the most desirable design features of a transonic airplane could not hurt anyone, providing they did not distract from more pressing business."38

So the start of the X-1 project predates the Ordnance Aerophysics Laboratory wind tunnel, which became operational around November 1945.