The "Battle Flight" has just arrived. It really seems to be a fascinating piece of work.
As for this topic Chris Gibson has indeed published a drawing of what looks like a land-based Seaslug system with triple launchers (taken from HMS Girdle Ness?) and radars strikingly resembling Type 901 radar. What is more, however his book contains a reference to the source of the original drawing, which is a book "Development of the Guided Missile" by Kenneth W. Gatland published in 1952 (and it is the very book that I read some twenty years ago!). The book is still available at my library in Warsaw, so I have borrowed it and here you've got some info and drawings.
K.W. Gatland describes an air defence system for London that was to consist of eight launching sites equally spaced on a circle at a distance of 25 miles from the city's centre each with a battery of eight launchers. There were to be two types of the sites. The first was to consist of a number of trailer-mounted ramps (ie launchers), with the radar and control trucks/trailer and supply vehicles for the missiles and propellant. The ramps were to be drawn up in a circle round the radar and control vehicles. This type of installation could have been moved by road and established at short notice in almost any part of the country.
A more permanent installation was to have eight trailer-type launchers (my understanding is that they were to be of the same type as in the system's mobile/transportable version) deployed around a central block-house. This building was to have an underground store rooms for the missiles and a control tower on the roof. A service road was to lead to the store rooms through a short tunnel. Eight loading bays were to be provided round the building with rails extending to the launching stations on the perimeter of the site. The missiles having been brought up from the the store room by elevator were to be placed on trolleys and moved through bays for final checks, fuelling and fitment of boosters prior to being sent out along the rails to the launching ramps.
The fire-control equipment (radar etc.) were to be housed in trailers that, together with the trailer-type lauchers could have let the system be mobile.
The missiles are quite similar to the Shorts GPV test missiles: they had eight (or rather four twin) boosters, and the sustainer liquid-fuelled engine. Launched from a single-rail lauchers they were to use the beam-rider guidance system. Interestingly their range was to be near 50 miles, which may correspond to the very early requirement for guided weapons that called for the range of 100,000 yards (which, as it turned out quite quickly was unattainable with the beam-riding system hence further developments of semi-active guidance) - something like 'the original Red Heathen' in the Missiles Relationship table in my previous post.
It is really intriguing whether the system described by Gatland in 1952 was his own invention or rather he was inspired by actual designs or at least ideas of that era. Having browsed through his book I have a feeling that he was writing about rather real projects than fantasies. The quotation from "The Early Development of Guided Weapons in the United Kingdom, 1940-1960" in this topic's opening post may also suggest that in the early 1950s such a concept might have actually been considered.
Piotr
