Talk:V-2 rocket

Naming

It is not called "V-2" but "V2" in any war and post war documents.

guidance system

I found this while looking for the history of gyroscope. I cannot tell if this is interesting to add or not to this article. SG-66 Guidance system for the V-2 (1944)

"modest damage"

I removed the inaccurate and insulting: caused modest damage near Porte d'Italie. The blast killed seven person and wounded thirty-six other much more than the other V2 attack did the same day. It was at Maisons-Alfort in Paris suburbs, far from Porte d'Italie.

AMERICAN ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY - AAS History Series, Volume 21 - Chapter 5 - France and the Peenemünde legacy - ISBN 0-87703-439-7

some site http://www.armes-v.com/?p=984

References

Launch Sites -- Fixed Sites Missing

Shouldn't the "Launch Sites" section at least mention La Coupole and the Blockhaus d'Éperlecques? -- johantheghost (talk) 07:37, 14 October 2020 (UTC)

Sorry, my bad -- reading too fast. Still, given the huge effort that went into building, and then destroying, them, maybe the sites at Watten and Wizernes could use a few more column inches. -- johantheghost (talk) 17:37, 30 October 2020 (UTC)

3 casualties per launch?

Beginning in September 1944, over 3,000 V-2s were launched by the German Wehrmacht against Allied targets, first London and later Antwerp and Liège. According to a 2011 BBC documentary,[6] the attacks from V-2s resulted in the deaths of an estimated 9,000 civilians and military personnel, …

This implies to me that the 3000 V-2s (each 50-100 thousand RM) only caused 3 deaths on average? One of the numbers might be wrong. Torzsmokus (talk) 14:51, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

The numbers are even less: about 1 enemy death per launch. and 2 POWs worked to death. IF a V2 would strike its target the result of 1 ton explosives was devastating. But in general it failed to hit a target the size of London. With a guesstimate of 150 kills on hit, one gets a hit rate of 40 in 5200. This is where Freeman Dyson's evaluation springs from. The V2 programme was worse than useless.

rear (bottom) view of the V2 showing fins

Here is a picture of the rear view (bottom if on a launch pad) view, showing the steering fins and engine exhaust port:

V2-rearview

In case anyone wants to add it to the article. Gah4 (talk) 09:24, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

V2 control logic

This one shows the control logic of the V2:

V2-control-logic

Gah4 (talk) 09:29, 13 May 2021 (UTC)

Assessment

Are the figures for the cost correct??? 'The rocket and the Reich' page 273 claims 'about half a billion WWII vintage dollars. By way of comparison, the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb cost the United States about 2 billion 1940s' dollars.'

++++

I think that Michael Neufeld's "The Rocket and the Reich" figures (i.e. roughly $500 million) are more believable, whereas the other estimates of "$2 billion" or (even worse) "50% more than the Manhattan Project" (i.e. ~$3-3.3 billion) that you see floating around out there on the interwebs are hyperbolic rubbish that do not pass the smell test. I intend to change the Wikipedia V-2 article accordingly. Neufeld at least provides something of a breakdown of costs: 150 million Marks annually to operate Peenemunde; Mittelwerk's receiving 450 million Marks for finished missiles; other unspecified sums for LOX plants, Zeppelin, Schlier, Zement, etc. and concludes that "Thus 2 billion marks would appear to be a reasonable, even conservative estimate. If those marks are converted according to the gold standard of that era (4.2 marks to the dollar--a problematic assumption), this amount equals about half a billion U.S. dollars of World War II vintage..." What Neufeld is alluding to with "problematic," though, is that the German Mark was "funny money," and not freely convertible since about the late 1930s on. I strongly suspect that had it been convertible, it would have been badly devalued by the middle of the war relative to USD, which would tend to drive the real cost of the V-2 down still further. But setting that aside, I will broadly buy Neufeld's figure of $500 million. $2-3 billion, though, I absolutely will not, for the following reasons:

Smell Test #1: relative size of economies. Per Mark Harrison's "The Economics of World War II," (p. 10) the size of the U.S. economy in 1943-44 (i.e. the time period of peak expenditures for both projects) was $1,399 billion, and $1,499 billion respectively, vs. $426 billion and $437 billion for the Reich (these are 1990 dollars, btw). In other words, Germany's economy was 30% the size of the U.S. Per Neufeld, a $500 million price tag meant that "the Army rocket program imposed a burden on the Third Reich roughly equivalent to that of Manhattan on the United States." That's fair, as it would have represented a relative load on the German economy of about three quarters the same magnitude as the American Manhattan Project (i.e. $500 million divided by 30% (the size of the German economy) would equate to about ~$1.7 billion of load if the Americans were running a similarly-sized project.) The Manhattan Project's final price tag (per the U.S. Department of Energy history "The Manhattan Project--Making the Atomic Bomb", p. 20) was $2.2 billion. So, a $1.7 billion project is 77% of that. From a smell-test perspective, gauging the rough effort level, I'll buy that. However, I will not buy that the Reich was somehow magically capable of shouldering a production effort whose relative burden would have been *300-450%* of the Manhattan Project (i.e., something in the $2 - $3.3 billion range in absolute terms). The German war economy was focused overwhelmingly on short-term weapons production needs, such as aircraft and tanks. That is one of the reasons that the German atomic bomb program was shelved in mid-1942--it could produce no return in the timeframe needed (Speer, "Inside the Third Reich," pp. 226-9). Put another way, there was a lot less "fat" in the German military budget to be sunk into highly speculative weapons projects that might or might not work. Even given Germany's fetishistic approach to wunderwaffe, a project like this just wasn't in the cards, particularly given the fact that V-2 didn't win top priority until mid-1943. Which brings us to...

Smell Test #2: Project priorities. Even after the highly successful test flight in October 1942, followed by Hitler's visit to Peenemunde in July 1943, he only specified that the program be placed on par with tank production (Speer. 368). Neufeld's book also talks in great detail about how, even after Hitler embraced the V-2, its priority status yo-yo'ed around, which had a direct effect on resources. Meanwhile, from the time Leslie Groves took over Manhattan in September 1942, it had a AAA Priority (the highest) from the War Production Board. So, how do you propose to out-spend Manhattan on the basis of a smaller national economy, and with a project that for the first years of its life has to navigate the Reich's capricious priority systems and various competing economic satrapies, and only becomes the Reich's highest priority by the summer of 1943? By that time, Manhattan has a solid year of high-volume spending under its belt, meaning V-2 would have had to have dramatically outspent Manhattan during its final year or so of operation before things fall apart in the Reich in mid-1944. Uh uh. Not happening. The rates of capital investment would have been prohibitive (see James Lacey "Keep From All Thoughtful Men" for a good overview of why you can't simply ramp up project spending to fantastic new levels overnight--it's impossible to absorb huge influxes of capital without having laid the basework of raw material extraction, processing capacity, and other plant and equipment first. It doesn't matter how much money you may want to throw at the problem--there's only so much you actually can.)

Smell Test #3: relative size of work forces involved. Per the U.S. Army official history ("Manhattan—The Army and the Atomic Bomb," p. 344), at peak employment in 1944, the Manhattan Project was utilizing 129,000 workers. From what I can gather, the V-2 workforce was 1) the Peenemunde staff (several thousand), 2) about 60,000 slave laborers at Mittelwerke for manufacturing, 3) some number of Todt Organization construction workers, and 4) various at Zeppelin, etc. We don't have hard numbers for any but #2, but we *do* know that it was Himmler's intent to have substantially *all* of the labor force be slaves. Per Speer (p. 369) "All industry would have to furnish would be the management and the engineers." It seems clear that slave laborers accounted for the bulk of the V-2 work force. If that is true, then, what? 80,000 workers, maybe? But American workers were the highest-paid in the world *by far*. German per capita income for factory workers was vastly lower (see Adam Tooze, "The Wages of Destruction," pp. 138-144, which points out that the standard of living enjoyed by the average American worker in the mid-1930s (a multi-room flat, a radio, a refrigerator, maybe even a car) was fantastically beyond the reach of all but upper-end white collar workers in the Reich). And of course labor costs for concentration camp slaves (which were not zero, in that they consumed food, and needed guarding, etc.) were certainly substantially lower than even that. Likewise, it is a truism in economics that, broadly speaking, all costs are labor costs. By corollary, then, with a smaller total work force, and a *much* less well-paid work force at that, how would Germany have had any ability to actually spend *more* on the V-2 than the U.S. would have spent while utilizing a much larger, better-paid American work force? Answer: not possible.

Smell Test #4: rare materials involved. There was nothing particularly exotic about the V-2 in terms of the rare materials that went into it. Aluminum and steel and liquid oxygen and TNT. It wasn't like the nozzles were gold-plated iridium, or something like that. Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, the Americans are utilizing cyclotrons in enormous production facilities to first refine and then enrich incredibly rare Uranium isotopes, produce Plutonium, and so on. Now to an extent, all of these "rare materials" costs are just labor costs in themselves, in that the reason U-238 was so freakin' expensive is that you had to sink the labor and steel into building great big muthah plants and cyclotrons to do all that stuff. But I just don't see anything in a V-2 that is even remotely comparable in terms of raw materials challenges that needed overcoming. You just needed a lotta lox, propellant, and stuff that went kaboom. Indeed, what you get out of a reading of Neufeld is that steel bottlenecks (which were endemic to every wartime economy, even America's, and were *by far* the most important constraint in the German economy from the moment the Nazis came to power (see Tooze, pp. 231-2, 239-40, 302-3, and in particular 571-6) were a real problem. Meanwhile, the guidance systems for the V-2 were by far the most intricate technical bottleneck. Sorry, but that's not even remotely in the same league with the stuff Manhattan was having to overcome, *and which it ultimately did overcome by throwing mountains of cash at allocating the steel and workers to building the production assets needed to make the problems go away.*

Summary Analysis: the "$2 billion" price tag (or more) often accorded the V-2 program does not compute. It's rubbish. It is either another example of Nazi fan-boy fetishism around the supposed superiority of German wunderwaffe programs, and the German war effort in general, OR someone back in the 1970s simply saw a price of "2 billion marks" and forgot that 2 billion marks is hella less than 2 billion greenbacks. I dunno. But I am extremely confident that Neufeld is closer to the truth than those other numbers, and I intend to amend the article accordingly.Jparshall (talk) 19:22, 19 July 2022 (UTC)

Taking it to GA

I think the most glaring issue with this otherwise pretty decent piece is the first section, which is more a biography of Von Braun than a history of the V-2. A more general section on rocketry in Germany in the 20s and 30s (Dornberger's book is a good reference) would be more appropriate.

--Neopeius (talk) 04:59, 21 June 2021 (UTC)

Maximum ascent speed

The supersonic impact speed was presumably obtained by the free fall under gravitational acceleration from the apogee. The powered ascent speed needn't be anything like this, all it needs to do is get the rocket to the requisite height, it could take quite a long time. The article makes clear that the range was determined by the engine cut out 'at a certain (ascent) speed', but it doesn't say what that speed was - this is surely a vital piece of information. I very much doubt the engine could propel the rocket to 3,300 mph, which is what is commonly claimed. Wolstan Dixie (talk) 10:17, 24 September 2021 (UTC)

A quick web search found a few articles with no mention of speed. Then this one says: maximum:5,760 km/h (3,580 mph), at impact: 2,880 km/h (1,790 mph). Gah4 (talk) 06:17, 13 June 2022 (UTC)