WW1 Remotely piloted missiles

If the Imperial German Navy had become operational with Remotely Piloted Missiles during The Great war what impact would this have had on future guided missile development?

How successful do you think the guided missles would have been if they saw combat?
 
What would the technology be? The only way I could envision a guided missile at all is as a wire-guided electrically controlled small aircraft.

In that case, very poor performance at very short ranges. Better luck with manually guided torpedos, I should think, since the weight of the guidance wires (significant, at this stage of metallurgy and without plastics) would be less of an issue.
 
Short of magic, any sort of guided missiles at this stage would be useless. You'd need drastic changes in previous technological development for anything even viable to appear.
 
What would the technology be? The only way I could envision a guided missile at all is as a wire-guided electrically controlled small aircraft.

Wire-guided Fokker aerial torpedoes dropped from zeppelins! The could be controlled from the observation cars that were lowered from the zeppelins. Just can't get the cables knotted together.

Perhaps for bombing cities, but not so good hitting ships on the high seas. Possibly deployed from the Gotha bomber.
 

MacCaulay

Banned
I'll have to find a link, but the US military was developing drones. Unguided monoplanes that launched off rails and were basically designed to fly until their fuel ran out then crash into what ever was under them. I know that the Wright Brothers and Curtiss aviation had something to do with it.

But I think it was a Wright design.

I saw it on a history channel special about unmanned aerial vehicles. They had footage of them. They were about...six feet long, maybe, a wing span of a Buick.
 
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