wrote:



Coupla things wrong here. The A-9/A-10 was *never* though of as a
"manned bomber," but as an unmanned ICBM.


There are existing WW II drawings of a manned A9 swept-wing version
showing cutaways of the interior; von Braun was pitching this to the
Luftwaffe as a a high altitude supersonic reconnaissance plane, but as
the Luftwaffe pointed out they didn't quite need _that_ level of
performance to be safe from allied fighters.
This thing is historically interesting, as it's what got him icharged by
the Gestapo with ignoring work on the V-2 to concentrate on manned
spaceflight instead. He was also talking about flying a pilot over the
Atlantic in 30 minutes, which is something the manned A-9 couldn't do,
so he must have been referring to some sort on manned derivitive of the
A9/A10.
The biggest argument for a manned version of a A9/A10 is accuracy...even
over its range of 200 miles the V-2 was coming down inside a ovoid
around 8 miles wide by 12 miles long, and if you start extrapolating
that to the distance from western Spain (the original planned A9/A10
launch site) to the U.S. eastern seaboard (3,000 miles) you end up with
an ovoid 120 miles wide by 180 miles long in which somewhere a one-tonne
explosive charge is going to land. And doesn't even take into account
the staging of the vehicle or inaccuracies as the A-9 skips in and out
of the atmosphere.
In the absence of some sort of homing system for the rocket (such as a
radio beacon cunningly planted by Nazi spies inside a loaf of
Pumpernickel bread on the observation deck of the Empire State Building)
the A9 is going to come down just about anywhere, which is strategically
worthless. You need the pilot to guide it to the target. Yet the project
stays active at a low level during the whole of WW II and suddenly gets
pushed forward at the very end, which means the high command thinks
there's some virtue in it.
It took approximately forever for the Germans to completly fess up about
those Reichenberg manned V-1s, and I imagine neither von Braun or the
U.S. Army thought it was going to help matters much if something like
transatlantic kamikazes got mentioned in the press.
As far as the jettisonable cover over the ramjet inlet, I've never seen
any info on this, but it's a good idea to decrease drag while doing
rocket flight in the stand-alone A-9 reconnaissance version, or protect
the ramjet from reentry heating in the A9/A10 version, so I wouldn't be
at all surprised if it was incorporated in the final design. It's
interesting to note that early on when they are doing the work on the A9
upper stage it uses the dart-type wing, but when they get around to the
A4b tests at the end of the war, it has swept wings. Although these
would give it higher drag and a slower approach speed to target, they
would have enhanced its maneuverability and cross-range in a manned
version over the slim gothic delta concept, and that would be a benefit
to a manned derivative.

The "turbojet sustainer" on
the vehicle shown was a ramjet. This vehicle was meant to be a
single-stage research vehicle (think X-15).


It was pitched as a reconnaissance machine; it would fly out over the
target to be photographed on rocket power at very high altitude, take
its photos, descend back into the lower atmosphere, and fly back home
under ramjet power.
The whole thing is the starting point for the built, but never flown,
North American NA-704 XSSM-A-2 rocket/ramjet missile which evolved into
the G-26 Navaho missile.

Pat