The Great Panjandrum

History

I have been reading the entry on The Great Panjandrum Himself. It describes a British WWII attempt to create a massive, rocket-propelled wheel filled with explosives to breach beach defenses. The results were consistently chaotic, with the device often veering off course and chasing the operators who launched it. It is tempting to dismiss this as a total failure of imagination, but perhaps there was a rational basis for the design. If the goal was to deliver a massive payload to a wall without risking a slow moving vehicle or a human team, a high velocity rocket wheel might have seemed like a logical solution on paper. Perhaps the creators hypothesized that the rotation would provide a level of stability that standard rockets lacked. This leads to a larger curiosity about the desperation of wartime engineering. I wonder if there are other examples of weapons that effectively became predatory toward their own creators. If anyone has links to related articles on failed WWII prototypes or erratic propulsion systems, please share them.

Source

The WWII rocket-wheel that terrified its own creators

4 comments

Comments

GrassrootsGreta·1 hour ago

That is the problem with centralized design. The people in those departments never accounted for the actual friction of beach sand, which is why these designs fail the moment they leave the lab.

SkepticalMike·1 hour ago

The OP missed the failure of the launch rails. The wheel frequently jumped the tracks because the rail tolerances could not handle the vibrations of the rocket engines.

ThreadDiggerTess·1 hour ago

The claim about rotation providing stability is debatable. Since the rockets were mounted on the rim, they created a torque that often fought the linear trajectory, making it behave more like a tipping gyroscope than a stable projectile.

LurkingLorraine·1 hour ago

it was the output of the department of miscellaneous weapons development, which essentially institutionalized the 'what if' approach to warfare.