I was watchin a show and these 2 bombs just popped up.They were one the coolest british bombs i ever seen.they were made to explode underground to cause an earthquake to destroy buildings,bridges,and many other things.the bombs were invented by Professer Dr. Barnes Wallis.Barnes also invented another succesful weapon that destroys dams by skiping on top of water,the up keep.
http://www.raf.mod.uk/structure/617squadron.cfm
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/julie.bell102/
http://www.lancastermuseum.ca/s,tallboy.html
http://www.bismarck-class.dk/tirpitz/miscellaneous/tallboy/tallboy.html
http://home.aol.com/nukeinfo2/
http://www.computing.dundee.ac.uk/staff/irmurray/bigbounc.asp
Some Links that might be useful, I used to drive past these bombs every day on the way to work, even today they are quite impressive.
Has any one ever considered what it must have been like in a Lanacaster to drop a Grand Slam bomb?
As a Grand Slam has a mass of about 10,000 Kg, I’d estimate that the Lanacaster’s 18,000 Kg experienced an acceleration of about 6g at the moment of bomb release until the pilot managed to get his trim under control again.
Not bad for a WW2 bomber. Are my numbers right? Were such “g” rates common on other WW2 airframes?
Nowhere even close. For an airframe weight of 18,000kg afterwards and a bomb weight of 10,000kg, the aircraft will accelerate at 1.8g upwards in the instant of release - it’s really simple Newtonian mechanics. That’s a fairly big bump, but nothing the pilot couldn’t achieve by pulling back hard on the stick (if it wasn’t, the aircraft couldn’t lift the bomb!). Easing the stick forward will damp out the bump very rapidly.
There is a film of a Lanc releasing GRAND SLAM on the Bielefeld Viaduct and you can see the a/c jump up as the weight is released
Yeah I’ve seen that footage - very impessive to see the Lanc lurch upwards so quickly. I guess that dropping a 10,000Kg bomb is equivalent to suddenly applying 100,000 Newtons of force to the underside of the aircraft (though as PDF27 woudl point out don’t trust my maths!)
You’ve still got the F=ma problem. 98,100N applied to a mass of 18,000kg gives an acceleration of 5.45 m/s^2. That’s 0.56g (hence I was blatantly wrong with my last calculation - that was off the top of my head and I should have realised it was wrong - 0.56 = 1/1.8).
Wallis.Barnes also invented the wellington didt he ??
was the grand slam earthquake bomb the very same bomb that they droped on the turpitz ??
Barnes Wallis was chief designer for both the Vickers Wellington and Warwick - he can’t really be said to have invented them as for things like that you have a rather large design team.
The Tirpitz was sunk by a number of hits from Tallboy bombs, not Grand Slam - Grand Slam was 22,000lbs, Tallboy was 12,000lbs.
oops i could have sworn , well there ya go thanks
Wonderful colored plates, markings fuzes, cross sections – german taxt
Download all three parts - the open part 1 to unzip
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