Scott Lowther wrote:



the W.W. II cutaway of the manned
rocket/ramjet driven A9 variant seems to suggest some sort of cooling of
the wing leading edge via the vehicle's propellants.



Erm... no. It had leading edge flaps.


The original perspective cutaway in G. Harry Stine's "ICBM" shows the
wing leading edge slats in a different shading than the rest of the
wing, and at their leading edge they abut the alcohol tank. Visible just
below the leading edge (the drawing is from slightly above and forward
of a side view) is a circular or spherical "something" that is either a
feed pipe to the leading edge of the wing, or the lens opening of the
camera equipment. The same drawing in "V Missiles of the Third Reich"
makes it look more like a piece of equipment than a camera window. If a
Peenemunde engineer wanted to cool something that was going to get hot,
what would be more natural than for him to fall back on a variation of
the regenerative cooling of the rocket motor's combustion chamber and
nozzle? Both the SR-71 and Concorde kept their insides cool by sending
fuel from their tanks through their exterior structure on its way to the
engines.





The other thing
they never addressed was how to keep the A9 stable during the
exo-atmospheric part of the flight after motor burnout.



Probably the same way the V-2 was to be kept stable exoatmospherically:
it wasn't.

Getting the dart shaped V-2 to come down pointy-end first wasn't a
problem with its tail fins, it would stabilize on the way in, no matter
how it first contacted the atmosphere; but in the case of the A9, there
would be the concern that it come in right-side-up with the wings level,
and not tail-end forward with the wings vertical, for instance. The X-15
came in sideways once, and the result wasn't good.
The Antipodal Bomber would have had this same problem, and it doesn't
have any obvious means of addressing it either. When I built my 1/32
scale manned A9 model, I gave it a fair amount of dihedral (as the W.W.
II drawings showed), so that at least it doesn't end up gliding with the
pilot either. When

The A-9/10
actually had some launch sites under construction in France, IIRC.



Only in Philip Henshall's mind; the old boy went to France and brought
back wonderful stories of A9 silos and A9/A10 bunkers and nifty
buildings where V-1's and V-2's were to be launched within a few feet of
each other (like either the Luftwaffe or SS would go for that); then
somebody actually went over and checked out what he had described... and
found that he had been "making it up as he went along", as they say in
"The Life Of Brian"; but this didn't stop him- next he fabricated a
radiological warhead carrying V-2 based on the "Korsett" test stand
mounting device that the A4 V-1 (first A4 prototype) slipped out of
during tests when the Lox made it shrink; his theory was that the
radioactive dust was kept between the Lox tank and motor; and that the
externally-mounted "Korsett" strengthened the rocket's structure at this
point- the end result was quite something to see- a V-2 with around 1/3
the propellant tankage of the original, and a horribly unaerodynamic
sleeve wrapped around it...but Henshall gave it greater range than the
original! (no doubt due to the fact that it didn't have all that pesky
alcohol and Lox weighing it down.)
Next thing you knew, the Korsett-equipped V-2 was right up there with
manned A9/A10s and BMW "Flugelrad" flying disks in the "Nazi
Wunderwaffe1946" mythology.
According to my "V-Missiles of the Third Reich" book the only A9/A10
assembly bunker was authorized on October 20, 1943 under a project
code-named "Zement"; it was to be located under the mountains near the
town of Gmunden at Lake Traun in Austria, and comprise two multi-story
galleries- "Anlage A" and "Anlage B" having a total area of 76,543
square yards underground.

Pat