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Old 10-22-2020, 02:45 PM   #21
Tessen
 
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Default Re: V1 and V2 launch procedures?

They could of have had pay loads of a biological weapons say cholera or nerve gas and used it to attack London.
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Old 10-22-2020, 03:06 PM   #22
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They could of have had pay loads of a biological weapons say cholera or nerve gas and used it to attack London.
Cholera is an intestinal infection. I don't think that's very weaponizable for bombardment.

Certainly a gas warhead would work. However, note that chemical weapons went almost completely unused in WWII despite all powers having access to both the chemicals and the means of delivering them.

Remember that by the time V2s were flying, the Allies were delivering a lot more tonnage of bombs to cities than the Germans were. And they had plenty of gas on hand. Not nerve gas perhaps, but dropping a few hundred tons of mustard gas on Berlin would have been straightforward, horrific, and pretty likely as an immediate response to V-weapon gas attacks.
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Old 10-22-2020, 04:29 PM   #23
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Cholera is an intestinal infection. I don't think that's very weaponizable for bombardment.
Drop the cholera bombs in the rivers, lakes, water treatment plants... V2s might be accurate enough to hit the Thames once in a while.
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Old 10-22-2020, 05:44 PM   #24
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Drop the cholera bombs in the rivers, lakes, water treatment plants... V2s might be accurate enough to hit the Thames once in a while.
That's a really inefficient way of using an already over-expensive and inefficient weapon.
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Old 10-22-2020, 06:13 PM   #25
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That's a really inefficient way of using an already over-expensive and inefficient weapon.
Yep. But it doesn't require any particular weaponization of the cholera bacteria or creating some sort of air-delivered version -- assuming the attackers were somehow stuck on using an inappropriate bioweapon with an ill-suited delivery mechanism.

Just to try to add some value to the post: a bit of Googling told me that the CEP of a V2 was about a mile.
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Old 10-22-2020, 08:36 PM   #26
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They could of have had pay loads of a biological weapons say cholera or nerve gas and used it to attack London.
That's a"maybe/sort of" with the V-1 but would be rather difficult with the V-2. Fusing the V-2 so the explosives airburst was complicated and frequently didn't work. A lot of the time the V-2 crashed through whatever building was at the impact site and didn't explode until it was in the basement.

You would get very little dispersal that way and fire from leftover fuel vapors ,extremely hot components and impact sparksmight actually sterilize the impact site.

If you wanted to disperse bio-chemical agents over London you could simply spray them from a conventional airplane at very high altitude. Using a V-weapon for this is just compulsive Mad Science!
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Old 10-22-2020, 09:08 PM   #27
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If you wanted to disperse bio-chemical agents over London you could simply spray them from a conventional airplane at very high altitude. Using a V-weapon for this is just compulsive Mad Science!
I don't think high-altitude aerosols would be an effective way of delivering either chemical or biological weapons. They're likely to be scattered down to homeopathic concentrations and blown entirely off target besides.
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Old 10-22-2020, 09:19 PM   #28
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I don't think high-altitude aerosols would be an effective way of delivering either chemical or biological weapons. They're likely to be scattered down to homeopathic concentrations and blown entirely off target besides.
<shrug> There are very few if any ways to use biological or chemical weapons efficiently.

Dumping cholera bacteria in the reservoirs just makes sure the water gets chlorinated twice before it comes out municipal faucets.

Needing to get chemical agents in concentrations like liquid rain means they'll reach no farther than high explosives.

There were some schemes for scattering small incendiaries to start massive fires and they mostly didn't work either.

There are reasons it's always that dull old BOOM-BOOM-BOOM.
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Old 10-22-2020, 09:31 PM   #29
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Default Re: V1 and V2 launch procedures?

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Remember that by the time V2s were flying, the Allies were delivering a lot more tonnage of bombs to cities than the Germans were. And they had plenty of gas on hand. Not nerve gas perhaps, but dropping a few hundred tons of mustard gas on Berlin would have been straightforward, horrific, and pretty likely as an immediate response to V-weapon gas attacks.
The Germans also believed the Allies had nerve gasses. Those had been discovered during pesticide research in the 1930s, and the Germans had rapidly realised their military potential and avoided publishing anything about them in the scientific journals. There had been no Allied publications about them, and the Germans assumed they'd been discovered by the Allies and were being kept secret.
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Old 10-23-2020, 01:46 AM   #30
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There were some schemes for scattering small incendiaries to start massive fires and they mostly didn't work either.
The one that did was the one used by the RAF. You drop 4-12,000 pound 'cookies' (also known as blockbusters) that were as much HE as possible, and these blow the tiles off the house roofs. As they're a large bomb and a simple cylinder, they drop fast. BOOM!

With them you drop masses of small incendiary bombs that being smaller and having fins, fall more slowly. By the time they hit the target area the roofs have gaps in them, though which these bombs can fall. This puts them inside the houses, in contact with their nice dry frames and floors and probably also in an attic full of old papers and dust and stuff, all mixed up by the blast that blew half the roof off. Woosh!
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