Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
Normal
Actually a pretty large fraction of all Firebee missions missed the targets completely, and the loss rate was around 15%, much higher then any manned aircraft. Bombing performance would be worse because precise timing is so much more important. We already know rerformance and reliability as a bomber would be poor, because the USAF actually built them as BQM-34 series drones in the 1970s, and that was using Maverick and other guided weapons rather then iron bombing. The whole system was incredibly expensive to operate because of the need for C-130 air launch and then helicopter recovery. Such a system had some appeal as a SEAD weapon, which is what the testing focused on. For blowing up suspected truck parks, you might as well save the money and spend it on the ARVN down south. A more cost realistic means of accomplishing low cost accuracy would be to place a system akin to the MSQ-77 ground directed bombing radar on a ship, and use that to guide the missiles. Then basically build a weapon like Loon out of sheet steel which will have awful survivability but cost almost nothing, and launch utter hoards of them from converted CVEs as was the plan for Loon vs Japan. Supersonic INS guided weapons would be very expensive when expended by the thousands, and entirely within the capabilities of SA-2 to shoot down. Even if they did work well, the end result will probably be the Soviet Union supplying P-15 missiles to North Vietnam, or much larger scale Chinese intervention then was already the case, or both. Of course this would do nothing to change the problem of the war plan being so hopeless. In fact it would almost certainly make the plan's even worse.
Actually a pretty large fraction of all Firebee missions missed the targets completely, and the loss rate was around 15%, much higher then any manned aircraft. Bombing performance would be worse because precise timing is so much more important. We already know rerformance and reliability as a bomber would be poor, because the USAF actually built them as BQM-34 series drones in the 1970s, and that was using Maverick and other guided weapons rather then iron bombing. The whole system was incredibly expensive to operate because of the need for C-130 air launch and then helicopter recovery. Such a system had some appeal as a SEAD weapon, which is what the testing focused on. For blowing up suspected truck parks, you might as well save the money and spend it on the ARVN down south.
A more cost realistic means of accomplishing low cost accuracy would be to place a system akin to the MSQ-77 ground directed bombing radar on a ship, and use that to guide the missiles. Then basically build a weapon like Loon out of sheet steel which will have awful survivability but cost almost nothing, and launch utter hoards of them from converted CVEs as was the plan for Loon vs Japan. Supersonic INS guided weapons would be very expensive when expended by the thousands, and entirely within the capabilities of SA-2 to shoot down. Even if they did work well, the end result will probably be the Soviet Union supplying P-15 missiles to North Vietnam, or much larger scale Chinese intervention then was already the case, or both. Of course this would do nothing to change the problem of the war plan being so hopeless. In fact it would almost certainly make the plan's even worse.
