Development
Firestreak was the result of a series of projects begun with the OR.1056 Red Hawk missile. When this proved too ambitious for the then state of the art, a lower performance specification was released in 1951 as OR.1117, and given the Ministry of Supply rainbow codename Blue Jay.
Blue Jay developed as a fairly conventional-looking missile with cropped delta wings mounted just rear of the midpoint and small rectangular control surfaces in tandem towards the rear. Internally, things were considerably more complex. The rear-mounted controls were operated by nose-mounted actuators via long pushrods. The actuators were powered by compressed air from bottles at the rear. The lead-tellurium (PbTe) IR seeker was mounted under an eight-faceted conical arsenic trisulphide "pencil" nose and was cooled to -180°C (-292°F) by anhydrous ammonia to improve the signal to noise ratio. The unusual faceted nose was chosen when a more conventional hemispherical nose proved prone to ice accretion. There were two rows of triangular windows in bands around the forward fuselage, behind which sat the optical proximity fuzes for the warhead. The warhead was at the rear of the missile, wrapped around the exhaust of the Magpie rocket.
Read more about this topic: De Havilland Firestreak
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“For decades child development experts have erroneously directed parents to sing with one voice, a unison chorus of values, politics, disciplinary and loving styles. But duets have greater harmonic possibilities and are more interesting to listen to, so long as cacophony or dissonance remains at acceptable levels.”
—Kyle D. Pruett (20th century)
“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)