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Tallboy exploded today!


JWM

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2 hours ago, JWM said:

New data appeared in today's news:

1. this was one of 12 Tallboys dropped on Lutzow, so far all were considered to explode in 1945...

2. the water column after explosion had 100 m height, this suggests that explosion had 60% yield of the completely uncontrolled one

Regards

J-W

 

That’s what I was wondering earlier. I assume that if the yield was 100% rather than 60 % that the effects would have been proportionally greater or exponentially greater?  
Makes you realise what the guys on Lützow and Tirpitz experienced. 

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The shock is proportional to power, and the power , as energy divided by time, can be smaller if release of energy is spread in time and I think that this was the idea of kind of slow burning of the explosive in bomb.  This is the reason of the smaller height of the water column, that energy was not released that much instantly like it could be with use of normal detonator.  

I have just asked on WW2 section about the details of the raid, and small but very important correction was given by @Seahawk  that not 12 but 14 Lancasters of  617 Sq dropped Tallboys there, 4 more were dropping lighter bombs. 

BTW - In some book on atom bomb race between Germany and US I've read, that when Brits start to use those large bombs the explosion craters were examined with Geiger Muller counters by Germans, to check it those are not atoms bombs... The power of explosion was that much! It sound strange, since we know now, that in case of Tallboy the 2.5 t of its explosive material gives 3.6 t TNT equivalent and in Hiroshima or Nagasaki it was 17 000 t or 20 000 t TNT equivalent, respectively.

Regards

J-W

 

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On 10/13/2020 at 10:36 PM, GrzeM said:

It was filmed - quite epic view:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iSRkvAupT8

 

7 hours ago, Mike said:

Thanks for the link :yes:

 

That's a big bada-boom! :shocked:  I would have liked a few more frames at the beginning though, just far back enough to see it first break the surface of the water.  It's like one of this gifs that ends too soon.  Just a bit frustrating :hmmm:

Don't frustrate. Just look at the youtube link I gave above.

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9 hours ago, JWM said:

small but very important correction was given by @Seahawk  that not 12 but 14 Lancasters of  617 Sq dropped Tallboys there, 4 more were dropping lighter bombs. 

 

I'm not sure that I was actually offering a correction.  I said only that 14 Lancasters set out loaded with TALLBOY.  Of those, Fauquier himself (PD119) misidentified the target and dropped his TALLBOY on a vessel on a canal closer to the centre of Swinemuende (missing by 10 yards), Sq Ldr Gordon's aircraft (PD115) was damaged by flak and after several runs on the target he found it enveloped in smoke and dropped his TALLBOY on a village on the way home (!) and Flt Lt Gavin, his PD116 also damaged by flak, jettisoned his live TALLBOY short of the target (he reckoned it undershot by 1/4 mile).   So of the 14 TALLBOYs, one (Gordon's) was definitely dropped on dry land outside the target area and Gavin's may have been.  I can't tell whether Fauquier's counts as in the target area or not.  So, as I read it,  between 11 and 13 TALLBOYs were dropped in the vicinity of Luetzow depending on how tightly you define "vicinity" and hence whether or not you count Gavin's and Fauquier's bombs.  (Powell's NG228 was one of the 12 x 1000lb bomb aircraft.)

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4 hours ago, Seahawk said:

 

I'm not sure that I was actually offering a correction.  I said only that 14 Lancasters set out loaded with TALLBOY.  Of those, Fauquier himself (PD119) misidentified the target and dropped his TALLBOY on a vessel on a canal closer to the centre of Swinemuende (missing by 10 yards), Sq Ldr Gordon's aircraft (PD115) was damaged by flak and after several runs on the target he found it enveloped in smoke and dropped his TALLBOY on a village on the way home (!) and Flt Lt Gavin, his PD116 also damaged by flak, jettisoned his live TALLBOY short of the target (he reckoned it undershot by 1/4 mile).   So of the 14 TALLBOYs, one (Gordon's) was definitely dropped on dry land outside the target area and Gavin's may have been.  I can't tell whether Fauquier's counts as in the target area or not.  So, as I read it,  between 11 and 13 TALLBOYs were dropped in the vicinity of Luetzow depending on how tightly you define "vicinity" and hence whether or not you count Gavin's and Fauquier's bombs.  (Powell's NG228 was one of the 12 x 1000lb bomb aircraft.)

 

Must have come as a nasty shock to some sailors and villagers too I bet.  More seriously to have even 7-8 of those things dropping in the near vicinity would be horrific if you were on the receiving end.

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An impressive length of time for that explosive to still be active. Someone commented about the relatively small size of the water 'spout' (?is that the right term?)

 

Tallboy was intended to be a deep penetrating bomb I think, so presumably it ended up fairly deeply buried in the canal bed. That would have damped the surface effects; I wonder what the canal bottom profile looks like now! 

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24 minutes ago, John B (Sc) said:

 

 

Tallboy was intended to be a deep penetrating bomb I think, so presumably it ended up fairly deeply buried in the canal bed. That would have damped the surface effects; I wonder what the canal bottom profile looks like now! 

I was once told that Tallboy bombs reached supersonic speeds as they fell. Does anyone here know for sure? 

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Just answering my own question. According to Wikipedia these bombs hit the ground at 750mph which is a whisker under the speed of sound at 770mph. So ‘high subsonic’ or Perhaps ‘transonic’ is the best description. Either way it’s quick enough to leave a nasty bruise! 🤕 

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Using simple school physics the free fall from 10 km altitude with neglected air drag takes about 45 seconds. So the maximum speed after such time with g acceleration (again with neglected air drag ) is about 430 m/s. (~ 1.25 M), This is a maximum which could be. Since in reality it was not supersonic it means that one cannot neglect the air drag...

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3 hours ago, John B (Sc) said:

Tallboy was intended to be a deep penetrating bomb I think, so presumably it ended up fairly deeply buried in the canal bed. That would have damped the surface effects; I wonder what the canal bottom profile looks like now!

This is what's puzzling me.  Those big MC bombs were designed to topple structures not with direct blast but by creating an underground shock wave and a socking great cavern.  Yet there's a tower not far from the water's edge that seems not to have wobbled at all.  I wonder if the explosive only part-detonated, or had deteriorated so much that it couldn't produce more than a small fraction of the original design effect.

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It did cross my mind , knowing what the bomb was designed for, how much damage has it done to the canal ??

 

Dick

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Perhaps the muddy sediment was too soft to initiate the detonator after the fall?

On the other hand - the it on water alone with speed above 1000 km/h should initiate anyway...

J-W

 

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2 minutes ago, JWM said:

Perhaps the muddy sediment was too soft to initiate the detonator after the fall?

On the other hand - the it on water alone with speed above 1000 km/h should initiate anyway

As I understand it those bombs didn't have a contact fuse, or they would have detonated on the surface.  The fuses - three of them, there's redundancy for you - were timed to go off once it had reached the intended depth.

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8 hours ago, JohnT said:

Must have come as a nasty shock to some sailors and villagers too I bet.  More seriously to have even 7-8 of those things dropping in the near vicinity would be horrific if you were on the receiving end.

Oooo, believe me, as a person who saw two explosions of combat 152-mm shells at a distance of 500-700 meters from yourself, You will remember this all Your life....I, like many residents of the city, was lucky then - the shells hit the city pond, raising fountains of water, less than in the video under discussion, but also quite high - it seemed to me then that it was 20-30 meters up.....just a hot summer 2014...fear, horror?  I just didn't have time to experience it ...

 

By the way, I somehow associate this underwater explosion Tallboy with the fate of the ANT-44, a unique Tupolew four engine seaplane

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_MTB-2

 

built in two examples, one of them crashed during takeoff on the Gelendzhik beam in the Black Sea, when it took off to bomb the Nazis during WW2.

After the WW2, already at the end of the 80s, this ANT-44 was found and since it was in good condition they were going to be raised to the surface.

But since it was completely loaded with almost 2 tons of bombs, they did not lift it up, but blew it up because it could pose a danger to ships.  This is how the unique ANT-44 aircraft did not become, the second one, if I am not mistaken, disappeared without a trace after flying off to bomb Bucharest.

 

 

B.R.

Serge

Edited by Aardvark
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20 hours ago, pigsty said:

This is what's puzzling me.  Those big MC bombs were designed to topple structures not with direct blast but by creating an underground shock wave and a socking great cavern.  Yet there's a tower not far from the water's edge that seems not to have wobbled at all.  I wonder if the explosive only part-detonated, or had deteriorated so much that it couldn't produce more than a small fraction of the original design effect.

 

Given that the canal was dug through river laid sediments, it is likely that the material yielded in a relatively fluid manner - this may be part of why that bomb failed to detonate originally. Generally a  rapid deceleration was required to start the final detonation process for (say) a depth estimating timing. Slow deceleration in soft sediment..

That sediment will also cushion the explosion shock - and because the explosion broke through to the surface, it will not have formed the full cavern effect which was intended.  Soft ground is a difficult target for artillery or bombs !

 

A fascinating video unearthed by 'chrisrope', thanks. Some very close misses which will have done major damage. 

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