VT fuzes from a 5" shell being used on Zuni-style rockets?

[icchan]

Okay, a bit of a weird set of questions, but it's related to some ideas I've been kicking around for a very alternate timeline that didn't have the advances in guided missiles that we did here in the late 1950s/early 1960s.  (Not that we had much going for things like the AIM-4, but Sidewinder was pretty good.  I digress.)  So I was thinking on other options, playing around with the old ideas of rocket packs as bomber interceptors...and I admit the general idea of a monster shotgun of rippled 2.75s is cool, the idea hit me.  Zunis are pretty quick, and accurate, and have a good-sized warhead compared to the 2.75" rounds.  And at 5 inches, they could potentially fit the radio-based VT fuse of a 5"/38 AA shell, or at least one based on it.

The fun part is, with all the love fighter-bombers got for the era, you could use the same launcher system and rocket motors (with warhead/fuse changes, obviously) across the board for both ground-attack and anti-aircraft, at least against bombers and subsonic aircraft.  Say proper radar guidance hasn't matured, and is still dealing with a lot of troubles with ECM perhaps.

So obviously there's a problem with the idea of just lobbing a bunch in one pull, since they'd get returns off each other when the first one arms and risk sympathetic detonation.  But if it had like, say a delay of a half-second each, and fired in a "stream" with enough separation, would this be workable?  Effective at all?  Or should I just load up on 2.75" contact rockets and make good close passes?

[Weaver]

Sounds good to me, particularly if the Zuni had more range than the FFAR? IIRC, interceptor pilots wern't too impressed by how close they had to get to score a hit with the latter, and there were several training near misses involving fighters and bombers and scary closing velocities.