PeterAlway
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- Jul 27, 2011
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While I was working on my WW II missile and rocket booklet, I downloaded a whole bunch of old scanned documents from a a bunch of military history websites. There was one rocket that I sort of noticed at the time, but hadn't quite pieced together. In the years since then, filed my various printouts of pdf's and I realized I could put together a complete drawing of this little 8-cm-diameter German rocket. The WW II vintage documents called it the 8 cm aircraft rocket, but that was evidently because all the measurements were made from rockets found mounted on a crashed or captured German plane. Wikipedia indicates it was primarily ground-launched, under the name 8 cm Raketen Sprenggranat. Both the old reports and Wikipedia agree that it was probably copied from the Soviet RS-82 rocket.
I could find no decent photographs of this thing. I found recent color photos of completely rusted-out hulks of the rocket with no surviving paint, and the photos in the documents were scans of printouts of microfilmed documents. Literally black and white photos with no greyscale.
Fortunately, one of the WW II reports gave a little bit of color information--the warhead was "dark green" with a bare steel adapter section at its base. It even gave the text of the marking on the motor section. I have to assume the motor section was also dark green. The lettering *looks* white, but for all I know it was yellow or some other light color. You can only tell so much from the image.
For all its iffiness, the Brits who wrote up what seems to be the original document made dimensioned drawings from the captured rockets with pretty much all the essentials.
Anyway, the thing has big fins, so you can build a flying model with no trouble, and rail button fans will like the launch guides. So here is my drawing, which will be 1/4 scale if you print it at 300 dpi, with the borders 3/4" from the edge of an 8.5" x11" sheet of paper, or 32% in word, or 9.52 x 7.02 in layout software, accounting for the line thickness of the borders.
I could find no decent photographs of this thing. I found recent color photos of completely rusted-out hulks of the rocket with no surviving paint, and the photos in the documents were scans of printouts of microfilmed documents. Literally black and white photos with no greyscale.
Fortunately, one of the WW II reports gave a little bit of color information--the warhead was "dark green" with a bare steel adapter section at its base. It even gave the text of the marking on the motor section. I have to assume the motor section was also dark green. The lettering *looks* white, but for all I know it was yellow or some other light color. You can only tell so much from the image.
For all its iffiness, the Brits who wrote up what seems to be the original document made dimensioned drawings from the captured rockets with pretty much all the essentials.
Anyway, the thing has big fins, so you can build a flying model with no trouble, and rail button fans will like the launch guides. So here is my drawing, which will be 1/4 scale if you print it at 300 dpi, with the borders 3/4" from the edge of an 8.5" x11" sheet of paper, or 32% in word, or 9.52 x 7.02 in layout software, accounting for the line thickness of the borders.
