Почему немецкие инженеры не могли объяснить, в чём была проблема с V-3

Picture a cannon too long to stand on wheels. A steel tube longer than a football field, laid into a hillside in France, with dozens of side chambers branching off it like the legs of a centipede, built to fire hundreds of shells an hour at London. And when Germany's engineers finally pulled the trigger, the shells came out of the barrel and flipped end over end like thrown sticks. The faster they pushed them, the worse it got. And for months, nobody could say exactly why. This was the V-3, the Hochdruckpumpe, the high-pressure pump. The men behind it were not amateurs. They were serious artillery engineers with the Army Weapons Office behind them and the personal approval of Hitler, and thousands of workers were digging the gun's future home into a chalk hill at Mimoyecques before the full-sized gun even existed. The idea itself was not new. In 1880 the American Lyman-Haskell multi-charge gun was test-fired at Frankford Arsenal in Philadelphia and lost to an ordinary cannon, because the flame slipped past the shell and lit the side charges too early. The gun was fighting itself. August Coenders, chief engineer at Roechling, believed electric ignition had solved that. His small 20 millimetre model worked at Misdroy in 1943. A 150 millimetre shell longer than a grown man was another matter. What we go through: The Lyman-Haskell gun, and the flame that got ahead of the shell August Coenders, the projectile man, and his finned Roechling shells Why a fin-stabilized shell has nothing to save it once the air goes wrong The millipede on the hillside at Misdroy, and the shells that tumbled Why every fault looked the same from the outside The March 1944 tests, metal stress above 1,100 metres per second, and General Leeb's call to stop Obturation, the sealing piston, and the ghost of Frankford Arsenal The 93 kilometre shot on 4 July 1944, and the gun that burst in the same test The Dambusters, the Tallboys, and Mimoyecques two days later Operation Aphrodite and the death of Joseph P. Kennedy Junior Hans Kammler, the shortened guns at Lampaden, and 183 shells fired at Luxembourg How the Germans finally stopped the tumbling, by slowing the shells down Said plainly: the V-3 was not impossible. At lower speeds it worked. The engineers fixed the gas seal that beat the Americans in 1880 and got a finned shell to 93 kilometres. What failed was the order of things. A concept proven at 20 millimetres was ordered at 150. A fortress was built before the weapon. A deadline was set before anyone knew how long the hardest problem would take. In its only combat use, the great vengeance weapon killed ten people and wounded thirty-five in a city 43 kilometres away. Every one of them was a real person in a city that had done nothing to invite it. The gun was beaten not on the test range, but in the calendar. Tell me in the comments: if you had been running the programme in 1943, would you have stopped the digging at Mimoyecques until the gun was proven? And had you ever heard of the V-3 before tonight? Chapters 00:00 - 02:19 - The gun that threw its shells away 02:19 - 04:09 - Lyman and Haskell, 1880 04:09 - 06:33 - August Coenders and the 20mm model 06:33 - 08:37 - The high-pressure pump and Mimoyecques 08:37 - 13:53 - Misdroy, and why the shells tumbled 13:53 - 15:59 - The seal, the 93 km shot, the burst gun 15:59 - 17:59 - Tallboys and Joseph Kennedy Junior 17:59 - 22:13 - Kammler, Lampaden and Luxembourg 22:13 - 23:27 - What really failed 23:27 - 25:29 - Coenders, the hill today, and Gerald Bull #V3 #V3Cannon #Hochdruckpumpe #Mimoyecques #WW2 #WWII #WW2History #GermanEngineering #Artillery #Supergun #VengeanceWeapon #Dambusters #Tallboy #BattleOfTheBulge #MilitaryHistory