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7/14/2025, 11:11:11 PM
>>63984790
Barnes Wallis really bought into the idea that strategic bombing could win wars without a single soldier needing to leave camp. When the war first broke out he came to the RAF with a proposal for his first concept of the 'Earthquake Bomb'. The plan was fairly simple: A ten ton explosive charge, wrapped in an aerodynamic and armor piercing casing - dropped from a high enough altitude that the bomb would break the sound-barrier before it hit the ground, meaning that it could bury itself deep in the bedrock before detonation, creating an artificial cavern deep below the earth - turning everything within about a mile and half of the impact point into a geologically unstable 'no go zone' that would be unsafe until somebody actually dug down to the cavern and filled it in with something strong enough to take the weight of the tens of thousands of tons of earth and rock above it.
When he presented his plan to the RAF they told him that no plane on earth could carry a bomb that large, especially not to the altitude required for his plan to work. So he went home, pulled a few all-nighters, and came back with a design for a plane that could. I can't confirm that it's the very first iteration of the idea, but in 1939 it's one of the earliest proposals for a fully sealed and pressurized crew compartment that I've found so far. Unfortunately the RAF decided that, as there was a war on and everything, the resources needed for that project would be better spent on proven designs that were needed and would definitely actually work. So the idea got shit-canned and Barnes Wallis had to make a smaller version of his earthquake-bomb that 'only' weighed about 10 tons.
If he'd gotten his way squadrons of his bombers would have been able to delete entire cities in a single raid (assuming sensible distribution of targets and relatively accurate bombing) and large chunks of Europe would probably still be uninhabitable today.
>tl;dr - Barnes Wallis was a real life Mad Scientist
Barnes Wallis really bought into the idea that strategic bombing could win wars without a single soldier needing to leave camp. When the war first broke out he came to the RAF with a proposal for his first concept of the 'Earthquake Bomb'. The plan was fairly simple: A ten ton explosive charge, wrapped in an aerodynamic and armor piercing casing - dropped from a high enough altitude that the bomb would break the sound-barrier before it hit the ground, meaning that it could bury itself deep in the bedrock before detonation, creating an artificial cavern deep below the earth - turning everything within about a mile and half of the impact point into a geologically unstable 'no go zone' that would be unsafe until somebody actually dug down to the cavern and filled it in with something strong enough to take the weight of the tens of thousands of tons of earth and rock above it.
When he presented his plan to the RAF they told him that no plane on earth could carry a bomb that large, especially not to the altitude required for his plan to work. So he went home, pulled a few all-nighters, and came back with a design for a plane that could. I can't confirm that it's the very first iteration of the idea, but in 1939 it's one of the earliest proposals for a fully sealed and pressurized crew compartment that I've found so far. Unfortunately the RAF decided that, as there was a war on and everything, the resources needed for that project would be better spent on proven designs that were needed and would definitely actually work. So the idea got shit-canned and Barnes Wallis had to make a smaller version of his earthquake-bomb that 'only' weighed about 10 tons.
If he'd gotten his way squadrons of his bombers would have been able to delete entire cities in a single raid (assuming sensible distribution of targets and relatively accurate bombing) and large chunks of Europe would probably still be uninhabitable today.
>tl;dr - Barnes Wallis was a real life Mad Scientist
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