The Dambusters Case Study

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Recommended: Nuclear bombing during the second world war

Have you ever skipped rocks across the surface of a lake or a stream? Well in World War II the English skipped cylindrical bombs across the water at the top of dams to blow up the dams.
This was done to flood and destroy German farms, coal mines, and factories which in turn would slow their production to help the Allies to beat Germans. According to dambusters.org.uk they called this project Upkeep and it had two other applications that were spherical and were for anti-ship applications and were called Highball and Baseball and the whole group was codenamed Golfmine. The English were forced to rethink how to do it because they had already attacked once before causing them to put torpedo nets upstream from the dams. This is what caused …show more content…

Since there were many issues with the spheres they moved on to the next closest thing they could drop accurately a very wide but not very tall beer barrel shape which was composed of an outer barrel shaped case which was meant to make it bounce better and an inner metal cylinder which held the charge. This designs main flaw was its outside case was made of wood which would shatter on impact so they tried to salvage the idea because they did not think the inner cylinder case could withstand the bounces and hitting the dam. To salvage the idea they tried to better reinforce the barrel using more bands going along the outside of the case which was proven a futile attempt. After the barrel design was given up on they decided to try the cylinder casing bare. The inner casing did not break up on impact like they worried and so they decided to use the cylinder design which was much easier to manufacture and did not require any special loading equipment except for the bomb holder which hung under the plane and was used to spin the bomb while the plane was flying using a hydraulic motor and a belt system. Once the bare cylinder was the final design they could train the crews and design the bomb interior and put in safeguards to ensure the Germans could not use their …show more content…

the force can be calculated with this equation according to What is the Magnus Effect. Fm = S (w x v) where the Fm equals the force of the pull perpendicular to the spin with the S equaling the air resistance in the surface of the object and the w equals the angular velocity of the object and the v equals the velocity of the object. This means that you can calculate the Magnus Effect on the bombs before the first bounce which would slow it down and would be nearly impossible to

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