Good ol' British balls of steel! we were born to fight :D:salute:

Definitely a V1.

I don't understand why if they were able to get that close that they did not just shoot it down? I know many were shot down, also by anti-aircraft batteries.

According to wikipedia, they were hard to shoot down, because they were relatively tough.

Steve

They were also filled with lots of stuff that went bang!!

That, according to Wikipedia, was one of the ways to shoot it down - hit the stuff that goes bang with a high-explosive round.

The other vulnerable spot was a valve assembly just forward of the engine.

Steve

Just don't be a few plane lengths away when you perform the operation :DL

The V2 Rockets were Sub-Orbital projectiles.
In other words?
They went WAAAAY high!
(But not so high to get stuck.)
Then fell at really, REALLY fast speeds!
Till they hit the ground with a bigga da Boom!

So they were kind of like trying to shoot a rock out of the sky.
No recorded success of killing a V2 on it's way down.
No recorded LIE about hitting one on it's way down!

For it's day?
It was THE Bad Arse on the block!

I am sure many Londoners would agree with you too.Truly a terrible weapon :nope:

That all depends on which end of the missle you are on, giving or receiving.:salute:

not only terrible but:
I consider launching weapons with no designated target of military purpose and causing huge losses of civilians as war-crime. :nope:

Not to be pedantic here, but it is mostly velocity, not altitude, that determines if something goes into orbit or not, though of course if you don't want to be dragged down by resistance against the atmosphere you have to be high enough to be out of the atmosphere. But if you launch something straight up, even if it is outside of the atmosphere it won't get "stuck" there. It has to be going fast enough so that as it "falls" it follows the curvature of the Earth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2

Operational
range 320 km (200 mi) Flight altitude 88 km (55 mi) maximum altitude on long range trajectory, 206 km (128 mi) maximum altitude if launched vertically. Speed maximum: 1,600 m/s (5,200 ft/s)5,760 km/h (3,580 mph) at impact:
800 m/s (2,600 ft/s)2,880 km/h (1,790 mph)The reason why the V2 was impossible to shoot down was because it was traveling up to 4.5 times faster than the speed of sound. The Allies had nothing that could intercept it.

I tend to say all's fair in love and war. We nuked two cities, after all.

Steve

ahh, its soo sweet - they look like they're holding hands...:yep:

Thats a V1 in the picture, the V2 didn't have wings.

But still... WOW!!!

:D
funny point of view!

I watched a video about the womens defense auxiliary that manned (or womanned?) the coastal defense 12.8cm guns. There was a lot of footage in it of them shooting down the v1s, often if they werent destroyed in mid air, they would be destabilized and crash, hopefully landing in the cleared areas but sometimes on the gun positions themselves.
ill try to find it.