Greetings,
We all know what the advent of Canonuk's wonderful English Channel Maps brought to IL2, and how the development of the object models for British Chain Home radar masts enhanced the atmosphere.
As far as I know, the same cannot (still) be said for the objects of German Radar equipment which were equally important to the air war in NWE. This challenge is for some enterprising modster to provide a package of the types of radar installatinos the Germans used to enhance the target selection in any Eurocentric maps fro IL2, and ultimately as the mechanism for radar continues to develope, these will be very necessary anyway.
This is just a brief menu, and hopefully discussion starter and modder inspiration.
Here they are :
Knickebein (bentleg) German dual beam radio navigation aid
Early war radar used to direct bombers to a target (this radar was used in the Coventry raid in 1940)
Wasserman early warning air search radar
Seetakt - a naval gun-laying radar developed in the 1930s and used by the German Navy, later improved into Freya air search radar.
Freya - Early German ground based air search radar
Freyas could be used to direct a fighter to the vicinity of a bomber, but since Luftwaffe night fighters didn't have AI at the outset, they were guided to the final attack using searchlights directed by Wuerzburgs
Flakleit G - GEMA(radar development lab) developed a gun-laying radar named "Flakleit g" for the Kriegsmarine, which was based on Seetakt and used the same 80 cm (375 MHz) band. Photographs show the Flakleit g to have some similarities to the US SCR-268 set, with a horizontally oriented and a vertically oriented antenna.
Wurzburg German ground based air search radar, very accurate and often used to direct FlaK
Wurzburg Reise - About 1,500 Wuerzburg Riese radars were built, with the type going into operational service in 1941
The original Wuerzburg antenna was a simple solid dish, but the Wuerzburg Riese had an unusual lattice framework structure; the dish was built by the Zeppelin company, and its construction reflected techniques used to build airships.
Mounted on a railcar!
The original Wuerzburg remained in service with anti-aircraft gun batteries. However, Telefunken felt they could improve on the design, and designed a new set, named "Mannheim", that operated on the same 50 cm (600 MHz) band but had greater accuracy. Some late models even had automatic tracking. Mannheim went into service in mid-1943, and about 400 were built. Since the appearance of Mannheim was similar, though not identical, to Wuerzburg, it was often simply referred to as "Wuerzburg".
Mammut - one derivative of Freya was named "Mammut (Mammoth)", which essentially consisted of 16 Freyas, linked together in a giant array with 192 dipoles, 30 meters across and 10 meters high (98 by 33 feet). It was mounted on four vertical structural beams, which led British intelligence to call it "Hoarding" (Britlish for the Yank term "Billboard"). About 20 were built, with the first going into service in 1942.
Mammut was a fixed-position radar, but it used electronic steering to scan over a field of view of 100 degrees. In yet another example of the parallel nature of radar discovery, the Germans independently developed phased arrays while the Americans were working on the same technology, and in fact Mammut was the first phased-array radar to go into production. Two Mammuts were often built back-to-back to give bidirectional coverage.
Both Mammut and Wassermann were excellent radars and became the backbone of the German early warning network. They proved surprisingly difficult to knock out, though eventually Allied strike fighters found that a barrage of rockets could do the job.
x-Geraet, y-Geraet directional German beam guided blind bombing systems, also known as Wotan I and Wotan II
The Germans adapted to the more fluid air-defense environment in the East by being flexible. The Soviets were not into strategic bombing, with the primary mission of the Red Air Force being battlefield support of the troops -- and the battlefront tended to shift, sometimes drastically, making investments into large fixed-site installations a poor use of resources. After the German advance into the USSR bogged down in late 1941, they set up a few Freyas at fixed sites, and then mounted the Himmelbett radar system on trains, shuttling them to where needed. They even mounted such a system on a cargo ship, and operated it in the Baltic beginning in early 1944 and up to the end of the war.
The artistic challenge with this equipment is self evident, but in addition to the future coding for use with in game radar, a simpler coding for animation panning the mechanisms to follow aircraft would be desirable, though not necessary.
Hopefully this is enough to get your juices flowing.
Many potential targets here.
Kopfdorfer
Author
Topic: Object Types Needed - German Radar Equipment (Read 23550 times)
