Even before the Messerchmitt Me163B entered service it had become apparent it had many problems that made it very difficult to use operationally. Two of the most important were its very short endurance which gave it a maximum of only two and a half minutes in which to engage enemy bombers after climbing to intercept…

After the German authorities had been so impressed by the high speed of the Messerchmitt Me163V-3 in October 1941 they approved its development into an armed interceptor designated the Messerchmitt Me163B named Komet, and ordered 70 of them. Redesign commenced almost immediately and the first prototype flew without an engine on 26 June 1942. However…

The Messerchmitt Me163 was the result of two separate technologies coming together to create a new kind of weapons system. Although the system had great potential its complexities, along with the accidents of history, meant that promise was never realised. After its defeat in World War I Germany was prohibited from manufacturing powered aeroplanes so…

From the mid 1950s the United States and the USSR competed to be the first to put a man into space. The German V-2 had shown that rockets worked and the development of the atomic bomb led to rapid advances in rocket technology. Both the US and USSR took over as much German technology as…

In October 1945 the USAAC sought proposals for a new missile system and a contract was issued to Consolidated Vultee (later Convair) to develop a system called MX-774. Three important innovations were a thin skinned rocket in which the pressure of the fuel in the tanks kept it from collapsing, a detatchable payload section and…

They say that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was the tank. It took several nations a while to figure out what a successful tank was and how to use it, and at the end of World War I the most successful and the most produced tank was the little Renault FT. (Perhaps…

In the 1930s the Russian word for Istribityel (Fighter) was synonymous with the name Polikarpov. The first Polikarpov fighter, the I-1, was an advanced monoplane fighter powered by an American Liberty engine that flew in 1923. Although it did not enter service the following I-3 biplane fighter flew in 1928 and about 400 went into…