Re: Mystery Mountain Meteorite Malady



Dr.Colon.Oscopy@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Do you
have any info on that V2 damaging the He 111 tug or on the incident
itself? Always guessing how fast that was going when it impacted,
roughest estimate I'ld venture is near mach 1 (just don't ask how I
arrive at that one) ..............Doc

I dug some stuff on the incident in the book "V-Missiles Of The Third Reich".
The missiles was A4 V38 (A4 rocket test vehicle #38) in that book they say it wasn't carrying a warhead, and the explosion was due to the fuel detonating on impact.
The color stills just before impact show some flames back at the exhaust, but they are only going a couple feet behind the rocket, so it looks like thrust was pretty much terminated by the time of impact.
Impact occurred 27 seconds after liftoff.
According to this, launch was on June 29th, 1943: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_V-2_test_launches, with a burn time of 15 seconds and a range of 3 km...although they don't give the nature of what went wrong with it, that makes it sound like the engine shut down prematurely.
The missile fell on Karlshagen airfield blowing out a impressive crater, although the combustion chamber survived intact.
The book shows a couple of photos of a He-111H (markings BJ+ST) that was in close proximity to the impact point.
The concussion wave has blown every last panel of the glazing out of the bomber's canopy while leaving the framework largely intact.
The impact point was just a little shy of 2 miles from the launch point (test stand VII).
I read about the damage to the He-111Z's in some other book a long time back, although I've never seen photos of them at Peenemunde - in fact, there are very few existing photos of them at all.

Pat
.

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