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
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