Re: U-Boat Snorkel RAM

In article <12l2rggrua73kb8@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Pat Flannery <flanner@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
What we do know is that they figured out the use of "Window"- radar
chaff based on metal strips measured and cut to the wavelengths of the
the detecting radar so as to maximize its echo on a radar screen like
free-falling resonant antennae around the same time the British did, but
kept the knowledge secret lest it be used against them.

As did the British, for a while. They eventually used it to support the
first real massed-raid campaign, the demolition of Hamburg. (Also
noteworthy for the appearance of the first man-made firestorm.)

What really threw them was the British Cavity Magnetron Tube...

The cavity magnetron had just one thing really wrong with it: being
basically a shaped hole in a big block of copper, it was just about
indestructible, and could be counted on to survive an aircraft crash plus
most any reasonable effort made by the crew before the crash. Nobody ever
figured out a practical destruct system for it. So with cavity-magnetron
radars in aircraft operating over occupied Europe by the thousands, it
inevitably wasn't that long before some of them fell into German hands.

(If memory serves, the German response was nevertheless slowed down by a
problem that hurt them in other areas too: faced with a major new gadget,
they tended to want to go back to basics and work through the theory until
they understood the new device completely, instead of just hastily running
off copies of it to get an operational capability quickly.)
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. | henry@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
.