AmmoSgt
Posts: 1002
Joined: 10/21/2000
From: Redstone Arsenal Al
Status: offline
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I'm not sure what what the offical name for these napalm armed bats was .. but the "BatBomb" was the nick name for the SWOD Mk13 GlideBomb ( SWOD stands for Special Weapon Ordnance Device).. I had the pleasure of refurbishing several SWOD Mk13 airframes and guidance packges during my aprenticeship as a weapons technician.
Mk13 was the 2000 lb Bomb version , I didn't get to work on any of the 1000 lb versions and I can't remember what their Mk designation was , MK12's I think. They were radar guided , sort of. they had a small radar in the nose that swept back and forth horizonally ( this replaced the pigeon that was the guidance system in the earliest version) the pigeon version relied on a pigeon that was trained to peck at the image of a ship ( peck on picture of a ship , get grain) the guidance system worked , on the pigeon version , by trying to keep the pecking in the center of the screen , off center pecks caused the control surfaces to change the direction of glide, to point the weapon at the ship, and center the ship in the small TV screen. The pigeon version actually flew better that the radar version. The radar version tended to fly with a side to side "waddle and swoop " as the control surfaces attempted to align themselves with the constant back and forth horizontal sweep of the radar . This effect had a benifit, as they were very hard to shoot down . The interface between the radar and the control surfaces came in two version , as with many wartime weapons , company and businesses that would never be involved with producing weapons in peace time , got contracts to make things they would never have considered making if it had not been for the war. In this case , the two companies involved were MIT , the university , and the Plumbers Union No XXX I forget the exact number. The airframe itself was plywood and I do not know the contractor. We did not use the WW2 era radars for the project I was on . The 2 Interface control packages were very different .. the MIT version had about 10,000 electrial contacts and could not be restored to a functioning condition , The Plumber's Union version had only 12 contacts and was peunatically operated and were very easy to restore to a functioning condition , ( go figure) . The first tests were done under the cover and guise of these being "Target Drones" and were dropped against US Navy ships with inert concrete warheads, the "waddle effect" prevented the AA gunners from shooting them down and the first two dropped actually hit the target ship and did some damage , but fortunately did not cause casualities. Subsequent tests were done against unarmed and unmaned hulks, The targets had to be metal and of ship sized dimesions due to the fact that the radar sweep had to have a constant contact ( ie have a target wide enough to fill a certain amount of the radar sweep to get a"lock on" ) . The ammount of sweep was adjustable , allowing some target size selection, but basically any metal mass large enough to fill the required percentage of sweep fill would be locked on to. 12 of each 2000 Lb version were tested and all 24 hit the target hulk. The only combat usage in WW2 was in the Pacific against a Japanese ancorage/ harbor ajacent to a captured British Oil Refinery ( I forget where) , while none were shot down , AA did cause several to lose lock and go into search mode ( unfortunately Oil Refinery's tend to be rather large metal masses ) the whole reason the weapons were used was so that the refinery would NOT be damaged , oh well, it was a good idea at the time.
In the early 60's ,18 of these weapons were brought out of moth balls refurbished and retrofited with what would become known as the Standard ARM Guidance package and were all sucsessfully dropped at China Lake , providing a proof of concept of the ARM Guidance System.
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"For Americans war is almost all of the time a nuisance, and military skill is a luxury like Mah-jongg. But when the issue is brought home to them, war becomes as important, for the necessary periods, as business or sport. And it is hard to decide which
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