Capítulo 341: Chapter 418 Seeking Retribution
That night, a full one hundred V-1 missiles were launched towards London, with over fifty of them hitting the city and the rest exploding mid-way due to malfunctions.
Dr. Oberth, who came to report, explained with a face full of shame, "I apologize, Your Highness, these were the first batch produced, and their performance is not very stable. However, I can assure you that the failure rate will decrease as we go forward."
"I am already quite satisfied, Dr. Oberth," Wilhelm said with an unconcerned smile, knowing that in the original timeline, the German army had launched 244 V-1 missiles towards London and 50 towards Southampton. Of those, 144 crossed the English Channel; 73 hit London.
After all, that was a project hastily put together, whereas they had spent several years researching. Out of a hundred, over fifty hit London, which was much stronger than in the original timeline. "Last time you mentioned that the V-2 rocket reached an altitude of 189 kilometers, that's almost enough to send a satellite into space, isn't it?"
The deployment orbit for satellites needs to be above 120 kilometers; if it doesn't reach 120 kilometers, the satellite will fall back to Earth.
As is well known, Earth has an atmosphere, with 90% of the atmospheric mass below 30 kilometers, gradually thinning above 30 kilometers. As altitude increases, air density drops sharply. At an altitude of 100 kilometers, the air density is one-millionth of that at sea level; at 120 kilometers, it's a few tens of millions of that at sea level; below 120 kilometers, satellites are affected by air resistance and cannot achieve an environment of unimpeded flight, so they can only fall back down.
In 1959, the United States successfully launched a satellite that reached a lowest point of 112 kilometers from Earth. The satellite successfully orbited the Earth once before falling back down.
Dr. Oberth looked troubled. "Your Highness, there are still some difficulties at present; the rocket needs more thrust." The last launch to 189 kilometers was just a test, and the rocket contained nothing but fuel. "We are trying the 'rocket train' plan."
As early as 1929, the Russian scientist Tsiolkovsky first proposed the concept of a "rocket train." At that time, he realized that single-stage rockets were too small in mass to achieve the speed needed to enter space (cosmic velocity), so he envisioned linking multiple rockets together. When the propellant of the bottom stage was exhausted, its shell would fall off, thereby increasing the mass ratio of the remaining rocket. By this logic, the final stage rocket could achieve the required cosmic velocity.
Of course, when Tsiolkovsky wrote this paper, liquid rockets had not yet appeared, and his data was based on the parameters of gunpowder rockets, so he estimated a much larger number of rocket stages, hence the term "rocket train."
Wilhelm shook his head slightly. "Dr. Oberth, it's not necessary to use multi-stage rockets to send satellites into space." Because the Soviet Union's first artificial satellite's carrier rocket was a single-stage rocket. It was just that four rockets, also known as boosters, were strapped around the central core stage rocket.
The boosters and the core stage rocket were ignited together on the ground, worked for a certain time, then shut down, separated from the core stage rocket, and were discarded. Since the boosters shut down mid-flight of the first stage rocket, they could only be considered half a stage. The Soviets used this one-and-a-half-stage rocket to send the first satellite, Sputnik 1, into an orbit of 215 kilometers.
Seeing the structure diagram drawn by Wilhelm on paper, Dr. Oberth suddenly realized, "It can be done this way."
"However, this is just a temporary measure; multi-stage rockets are the right way."
In later generations, single-stage rockets were favored again by the aerospace department due to their simplified structural design, reduced number of engines used, fewer separations, and other advantages, even developing into reusable rockets.
But that was 70 years later; in the meantime, they had to rely on multi-stage rockets.
While Wilhelm and Dr. Oberth were happily discussing the future development of rockets, across the Channel in the Prime Minister's residence, Churchill was hysterically shouting, "Retaliation! We must retaliate!!"
The reason for his great temper was that last night, a V-1 missile coincidentally hit Westminster Abbey, directly collapsing half of the building, with the other half also on the verge of collapse.
Westminster Abbey was founded in 960 AD and completed in 1065, established by King Edward the Confessor of the 11th century. Since its construction, the abbey has been the site of coronation ceremonies and royal weddings for successive British kings or queens. Most of the British monarchs were buried there after their deaths. After the British bourgeois revolution, many famous people also found their resting place in the abbey.
Such a historically significant and culturally rich building was destroyed, and Churchill was furious, with anger rising from his heart and evil growing at his gall. His plan for retaliation was simple: to deploy the air force with poison gas bombs to reciprocate the German army.
Churchill was not opposed to gas warfare and even had a particular fondness for chemical gases.
In the summer of 1919, the British army fought against the Soviet Russian army, and the British used airplanes to drop poison gas on the Bolshevik region. Churchill also advocated for a chemical weapons plan in northern India, but the plan was opposed and abandoned, and he asked unhappily, "We have chemical weapons, why waste shells, you are really too foolish!"
In 1950, feeling the pressure of the Soviet Union's vigorous development of military equipment, Churchill believed that if the Soviets developed more advanced chemical weapons first, Britain would be at a disadvantage, so his enthusiasm for chemical weapons was reignited. Under his advocacy, Nancekuke on the Cornwall coast developed from a small testing site into a large chemical weapons testing and production base. The production base produced about 20 tons of sarin gas between 1954 and 1956 and developed several new types of chemical weapons.
Until 1965, as the voices of opposition grew stronger and the British public's trust and respect for the authorities faced a crisis, the secrets of Nancekuke could no longer be kept and were exposed to the public eye, causing a great uproar. The famous British magazine Peace News published an article about the gas leak incident at Nancekuke in December of that year, satirizing the hypocritical ugliness within.
After World War I, countries agreed on the surface not to use poison gas bombs, but as a means of defense, even if one does not use them, one cannot be without them; otherwise, one would be at a disadvantage in a real fight, so Britain stored a large number of poison gas bombs.
However, when he informed the air force of this plan, it was met with firm opposition. First, it was very difficult for the British air force to break through the German air defense and drop poison gas bombs on German territory. Second, Germany's chemical industry was also well-developed, and poison gas was not difficult to produce; if needed, pesticide factories could immediately become poison gas bomb bases.
If the German army was attacked with poison gas, the Germans would certainly retaliate with the same method, just by replacing the warhead of the flying bomb (V-1 missile) with a poison gas bomb. Moreover, no one could guarantee that the Germans did not possess more lethal poison gas, the consequences of which Britain could not afford.
Under the strong persuasion of the air force, Churchill reluctantly gave up the idea of using poison gas and could only wait for Spain's "secret."
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