Red Dean as a SAM

[zen]

Fairly clear title for this scenario and one which does leave me wondering why this wasn't proposed.

Red Dean strikes me as a reasonable option to develop for a close defence SAM in the mould of Tartar, Mopsy/Popsy (based on Meteor/Red Hawk).

The main change is again to the Q-band seeker, and while it is limited to about 5,000ft in altitude. It is reasonable to compare and contrast with Tartar.
Q-band's chief weakness is likely rain, but they must have felt this was something they could work around.

A launcher developed for this SAM would benefit from being able to cope with missiles of 16ft length and 1,330lb weight.

Scope for further development, such as monopulse seekers, improved rocket motors, fuzes, warheads etc.... are substantial, and would result in drastically improved performance in all areas.
The nature of Red Hebe however might require a booster and preclude a direct replacement of Red Dean as a SAM.
Being a UK system, avoids dollar costs, and permits the system to be designed more precisely to fit RN warships, particularly the space for a 4.5" gun.

Computer trials for the Red Dean system continued until 1959.

The potential to use the launcher and other elements for a short range anti-ship missile is there within the technology, as elements of it were used on Green Cheese.

 

[pathology_doc]

Short version - too big for point defence; too short-legged for its size. Not a contender for the former; too much work required to get it into shape for the latter.

At the time of cancellation, Red Dean was having severe problems with sidelobe interference with target lock - until those problems are thoroughly sorted out, there's no way this missile is going to be worth a damn for intercepting sea-skimmers or low-flying aircraft; Sea Cat is the preferable system in that regard. The RN isn't going to saddle itself and its weapons-development budget with those issues just to save it from cancellation.

At the time of cancellation, the range was 10,000 yards from a high-subsonic air launch. Area defence requires boosters. The British preference for side-along boosters being what it was, that means a major redesign of the missile to accept the booster attachment points and arrange for them to come off appropriately. The problem with this is that if you are going to do any sort of missile manoeuvres in the boost phase, the control responses are significantly different from what they will be after the boosters have been discarded. You have to either build duplicate guidance protocols into the missile or eliminate any significant manoeuvre capability until after the boosters are gone (which induces a minimum range issue, and also causes headaches if the target manoeuvres radically in this time and the missile is locked out from following).

Finally, while active radar homing has advantages in terms of its fire-and-forget capability, the (necessarily) small dish is going to have problems locking on at extended range. For a point defence missile you are back at the sea-return issue you originally had (even if you've modified the missile to allow the ship's FCS to tell the seeker head where to start looking); for an area-defence missile you have to solve the dilemma of getting the seeker head close enough to lock on and arranging appropriate handover of guidance/control responsibility from the ship to the missile. So again, you're back with the problem of needing essentially a clean sheet of paper redesign.

Granted, at the time of cancellation Red Dean was badly in need of that anyway - at least the same sort of rationalisation of components that turned Firestreak into Red Top - but the problems are huge, and it's not simply a matter of dropping Red Top MkI into a shipborne launching system (which is a shame, I admit; doing that and bringing in the Navy as a user would have brought the total buy up, the unit cost way down, etc. Ultimately however, it is the same money which is being spent, regardless of which Service is writing the cheque).

Finally, the missile at cancellation weighs over a thousand pounds. How does that gel with the ability to fit it to a small, rapid response launcher (for point defence) or arrange its travel through a compact loading system when it's got at least two and possibly four solid-fuel boosters wrapped around it (area defence)? Sea Cat was small & could be lifted and manhandled onto its launcher; forget about doing that in a hurry with Red Dean.

By the time you have solved all of these problems, you might as well start with a clean sheet of paper.

Mind you, I used to wonder why they never used Phoenix as a SAM or (later) put its guidance system into the nose of a Standard missile. How much weight would it add to a ship to put AWG-9 in? etcetera; etcetera. Now I have a far better idea, and I've mostly stopped asking those questions.

I'm off to read my fifties-era missile books and see if there's a way around all this.

 

[CJGibson]

'I'm off to read my fifties-era missile books and see if there's a way around all this.' - Pathology_Doc

Don't waste your time, they're all boll...company and MoS spin.

Chris

 

[pathology_doc]

Heh. I take your point, but I'm not talking about brochures (though seeing the companies' pitches and the figures they offer up could be fascinating and enlightening) or articles written for boys'-own annuals and naive journalists; I'm talking about basic principles stuff, e.g.

"Principles of Guided Missile Design (Ed. Grayson Merrill; multiple volumes including guidance, systems and basic design, aerodynamics, operational research & launching, Airborne Radar)"

"Fundamentals of Advanced Missiles" by R B Dow (my copy of which is inscribed with the name Theodore Gold).

"Guided Missile Engineering" (Allan Puckett & Simon Ramo).

...for the purpose of understanding which I have spent the last ten years on YouTube brushing up on my calculus and other branches of mathematics.

But the existence of these books raises a question - almost all of them date from the mid to late fifties. By the time the last of them were written (1959), the Fireflash and Red Dean programmes were history, Firestreak was just entering service, Falcon (AIM-4) was long since in service (as were all the 3T missiles in one form or another), Sparrow was beginning to take on its SARH flavour, and Sidewinder had already seen combat. Most of those first-generation missiles were considered or evolved in the late forties to early fifties - what texts did THEIR designers read? Or was half the problem that there WERE no earlier texts to read, so new was the field in which they were playing?

 

[r3mu511]

...for the purpose of understanding which I have spent the last ten years on YouTube brushing up on my calculus...

Leithold just rolled over in his grave now that his textbook has been supplanted by social media, lol XD

 

[pathology_doc]

...for the purpose of understanding which I have spent the last ten years on YouTube brushing up on my calculus...

Leithold just rolled over in his grave now that his textbook has been supplanted by social media, lol XD

He can roll over all he wants - the vids I've been watching are mostly produced by professional mathematicians & engineers and/or their PhD students.

 

[CNH]

" Or was half the problem that there WERE no earlier texts to read, so new was the field in which they were playing?"

Nail on head. They were, in effect, starting from scratch.

 

[pathology_doc]

" Or was half the problem that there WERE no earlier texts to read, so new was the field in which they were playing?"

Nail on head. They were, in effect, starting from scratch.

That must have been a fascinating period of guided weapon history. We have, from John Forbat, the detailed history of what happened between when Vickers got Red Dean from Folland and the Ministry killed it; what I would love to see even more dearly and in the same level of detail is the story of what happened between when Folland first started on Red Dean and when they handed it over to Vickers.

What were the people at Folland READING? Sure they were writing the book (or at least the British chapter) on active-homing AAMs, but they had to have been reading SOMETHING that came before which made it all possible. Books on aerodynamics and electronics and radar even more basic and fundamental than the ones I've got, I expect. WHICH ONES? And who's got them? In the back of which out-of-the-way British bookshops, on which top shelf, do these cherished volumes - their margins crammed with pencilled notes and annotations - lie?

If I lived in Britain I would make it my business - were it possible - to write the story of Folland's Red Dean, because pace Fireflash (which would be equally fascinating), I suspect that's the origin story of British AAM technology. But I don't, so I can't. Maybe someone can, one day?

 

[r3mu511]

He can roll over all he wants - the vids I've been watching are mostly produced by professional mathematicians & engineers and/or their PhD students.

^that would make make him happy as those producers would likely have took Leithold's book in their first class of calculus, so his legacy lives on in the youtube era, lol...

 

[CJGibson]

Pathology Doc - 'Maybe someone can, one day?'

Well, I did. It's in Battle Flight The gist is that Petter wanted to design aircraft and despite the diktat that the X-band Homing Weapon should receive Petter's 'undivided attention', he wandered off to Lightweight Fighter (Midge) development. This annoyed the MoS and Air Staff so they took away the missile project. I doubt Petter was bovvered.

Chris

 

[pathology_doc]

Pathology Doc - 'Maybe someone can, one day?'

Well, I did. It's in Battle Flight The gist is that Petter wanted to design aircraft and despite the diktat that the X-band Homing Weapon should receive Petter's 'undivided attention', he wandered off to Lightweight Fighter (Midge) development. This annoyed the MoS and Air Staff so they took away the missile project. I doubt Petter was bovvered.

Chris

I know the gist - respectfully speaking, I'm after the deep, deep guts. Both BSP4 and Battle Flight are excellent books (I have them both, and if a BSP4 redux comes out at some stage I'll be pushing my way up the line to get it), but by their cover-everything nature they don't give those interested in/obsessed with individual missiles the detail they need.

 

[yellowaster]

Most of those first-generation missiles were considered or evolved in the late forties to early fifties - what texts did THEIR designers read? Or was half the problem that there WERE no earlier texts to read, so new was the field in which they were playing?

GW experiment and research was carried in the late 1940s/early 1950s by UK government experimental establishments (principally the TRE and RAE). The results of that work would almost certainly have been made available to UK companies. So I guess the designers would have had at least some data to work with.

 

[pathology_doc]

Most of those first-generation missiles were considered or evolved in the late forties to early fifties - what texts did THEIR designers read? Or was half the problem that there WERE no earlier texts to read, so new was the field in which they were playing?

UK government experimental establishments (principally the TRE and RAE).

I don't know about Britain, but way, way back when I was a little kid (or maybe just before), the Australian telephone network was nominally the responsibility of a branch of the postmaster general's office (all the junction boxes, manholes to get to them etc. had PMG stamped on 'em). So the first time I read about organisations like the TRE being involved in missile research, you can imagine where I let my mind go. Postmen with missiles! (Postman Pat, Postman Pat, Postman Pat and his black and white SeaCat...)

RAE may have had the upper hand on radar as a detector, but TRE probably had the deeper dish on turning detailed information into electrical pulses and back again - vital in that era when the missile couldn't carry its instructions with it and had to be told explicitly what to do.

 

[yellowaster]

RAE may have had the upper hand on radar as a detector, but TRE probably had the deeper dish on turning detailed information into electrical pulses and back again - vital in that era when the missile couldn't carry its instructions with it and had to be told explicitly what to do.

TRE was responsible for nearly all airborne and ground radar development in the UK in the early post-war era (in conjunction with RRDE, who handled mostly Army ground radars). RAE played little part in radar development (as far as I am aware), although they were involved in some aspects of aiming and fire control.

As regards GW development (not something I've looked into in great detail, I have to say), It appears that, in the early days at least, TRE worked on the radar and homing aspects, while RAE focussed more on aerodynamics and produced the "vehicles". So, as an example, in early 1946 the TRE were working on guidance, instrumentation and telemetry aspects of Long Shot (which became Red Hawk), including producing an analogue simulator to study radar, receiver and control unit problems, while the RAE supplied (and launched) the test vehicles containing the TRE electronics.

 

[zen]

Red Dean is too big.....but Tartar is not?
and in the light of Popsy A and B, and Mopsy and Orange Nell......?

So for SARH SAMs the UKs designs seem not to all have wrap around boosters.
But chiefly if the issue is the rocket motor. then a different rocket motor is the likely outcome.

Seeker, the Q-band seeker is the likely subject, and if I reccal reading correctly SARH was the final system, not ARH.
This mates with Popsy A and B and Mopsy and Orange Nell.

 

[CJGibson]

Pathology Doc - 'I'm after the deep, deep guts.'

Well, the hard fact is that no publisher would entertain such a book. It would be interesting, but not viable unless done as a hobby job for little or no money and you know what Dr Johnson said about that.

Chris

 

[Hood]

Much of the source material you are seeking would have been company archives and since all those companies are no longer with us, those archives have probably long gone and a great deal of stuff may never have been kept in the first place. Those early textbooks are probably long gone, but its not inconceivable some still exist (I've often wondered what books are on the shelves in the reproduction of Barnes Wallis's office at Hendon, which allegedly has many original items).

In addition to TRE is the ASWE (Admiralty Surface Weapons Establishment) which had a great deal of involvement in naval radars etc. We should perhaps not ignore the influence of Elliots, Ferranti, Marconi and ECKO in research programmes, there seems to have been strong co-operation with the TRE. Dave Forster's Black Box Canberras has illuminated the relationships of the times and the extent of experimental equipment produced. Doubtless there are others that never made the hardware stage that we still know nothing about.

 

[yellowaster]

I found "Moving Targets" a bit of a disappointment on the radar side. For example, minimal coverage of the FMICW AI radar for P1154. Excellent on the computing sidey though.

 

[Hood]

There used to be a good site on ECKO's radar work at Malmesbury but I think that went defunct several years ago.

 

[DWG]

We should perhaps not ignore the influence of Elliots, Ferranti, Marconi and ECKO in research programmes, there seems to have been strong co-operation with the TRE.

I remember a, now deceased, friend who preceded me at Rochester by about a generation, mentioning he'd worked on Rapier, yet without that I'd have said Marconi/Elliotts Rochester had little to no missile or radar involvement. A little googling suggests it was likely involved with Blindfire*, which makes sense as a lot of his work seemed to have been theoretical controls stuff, but I don't entirely discount the chance he was working on the missile itself. The institutional knowledge of who did what, never mind how we did it, disappears very quickly.

* And also adds yet another name, Marconi-Elliott Avionics, to the list of names Rochester has existed under.