Wasn't that hard a circuit to design (1914 radio tech). Vacuum tubes that can stand 25,000 G shock. That was all it was. The Americans had the vacuum tubes. Nobody else did. Not that nobody else could... just nobody else did, because they never bothered to make thick-walled vacuum tubes for ham-handed customers who would drop their 1930s era radios.
I know I'm talking to the walls a bit here, but it's worth noting that the British had a HUGE valve shortage in WW2 - to the extent that they were cancelling thousands of radars that were already ordered because they couldn't get enough valves to build them. In those circumstances, they aren't going to be building valves into shells and firing them off unless they have a revolutionary change to effectiveness - and while proximity fuses were good, they weren't that good.
They could not have flown higher than the Wasserfall’s range of 16 miles.
As has already been pointed out, ceiling and slant range are not the same thing. Very roughly the engagement envelope is represented by an inverted saucer - it can reach the peak ceiling directly above the battery, and the peak range at low level, but not both.
Bombing from higher up means much, much less useful ordnance landing anywhere close to the target. Most reports are scathing at how inaccurate and how useless most bombing operations were. The only two targets that seemed to be effected to any degree by high altitude bombing were oil production facilities and large transportation hubs. I’m thinking I’d put the SAMs there.
Umm... sorta-kinda. Bombing height didn't have very much to do with average miss distances, which were more to do with the weather and navigation. With the right training and conditions the likes of 617 squadron could hit within feet of the aiming point from 20,000 feet or above - problem is, those conditions were pretty rare. 20,000 or 30,000 feet doesn't make much of a difference though, except over Japan where there were unique weather conditions at altitude.
Once again bombing from high altitude is virtually useless and no bomber contemplated was out of the range of the Wasserfall and or a Guided V2.
No, but they had to be quite close to a Wasserfall battery to be in danger. At high altitude, slant range is only a couple of miles - and the no-escape zone is smaller still, because the bomber formation could easily make an emergency turn away when the launch is spotted and be outside the missile's engagement envelope when it finally reaches altitude.
The Wasserfall could have easily been made mobile and produced in large enough numbers considering how many V1 and V2s were made.
Problem is, making it mobile isn't that hard but the infrastructure to support it (radars, C2 systems, etc.) is hard. That reduces you to a daylight/fair weather system (rare in Europe), and one that can't be used as part of an IADS.
V1s were being launched at a rate of 100 a day or a possible 36,500 a year. They cost 50% of the cost of a Wasserfall so theoretically you could have launched 18000 Wasserfalls a year. 10% hit rate gives you another 1800 bombers hit in addition to the numbers shot down by fighters and AA guns. If you add in the number of bombers crippled at 3 for every on actually hit, you’re talking some scary numbers.
Implausible ones too. Transporting and launching that many Wasserfalls would be hard, since the Allied air offensive would start targeting their production and distribution facilities (as was done to a massive extent with the V-1 and V-2). 10% hit rate is probably optimistic given the restrictions on it (MCLOS at long range requires exceptional skills), and crippling the bombers depends on them being in a very tight formation. As soon as they spread out (and with the advent of Mustangs, the need to stay close for mutual gunfire support is lessened), the additional kills are gone. It's a valuable weapon, but not beyond the scope of the US and UK to deal with. If all else fails, the US could simply switch to bombing at night when Wasserfall was largely ineffective.
I'd be very cautious about Kopp's analysis - he's a bit of a dirty word in Australian defence circles. In some areas he really knows his stuff (from memory, his professional training is in mobile phone masts), in others such as aviation he knows enough to be dangerous. Stealth, SAMs, etc. are one such area.
Another little discussed effect of a Wasserfall barrage would be to break up the bomber formations. This was one of the main goals of the later battles in the air over Europe by the Luftwaffe. Specially designed rocket banks etc. were all designed to punch holes in the formations that could be exploited by the conventional fighters. Image what a barrage of semi-guided missiles would do.
That's probably the main value of it, rather than shooting anything down - being used as very heavy FLAK shells. That's within it's capability, but also one to which there is an easy countermeasure - split up formations when under SAM attack, reform later (or even just provide lots more escort fighters and move more towards an RAF-style bomber stream).[/QUOTE]
I guess that is where we have to leave it.
Ran across an interesting chart.
Attrition in Air Warfare: Relationship with Doctrine, Strategy & Technology
By Arun Kumar Tiwary
Attrition Rates in Days at Which an Air Force will become Combat Ineffective
22 days at 2%
16 days at 3%
8 days at 5%
4 days at 10%
It should be pointed out that RAF Bomber Command considered 10% "uneconomical" and did multiple raids over several years at 8-9%. Those figures are for a modern air force where no new aircraft will be being produced to replace those lost on a reasonable timescale. In WW2 terms where you have huge numbers of replacements coming down the line as well as crews, the calculus changes radically.