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Airborne leaflet dropping is a type of propaganda where leaflets are scattered in the air, normally by filling cluster bombs that open in midair with thousands of leaflets. Military forces have used aircraft to drop leaflets to attempt to alter the behavior of combatants and non-combatants in enemy-controlled territory, sometimes in conjunction ...
The bomb aimer then sights along this angle and waits for the target to appear, dropping the bombs when it appears under a notch in the backsight. Although a bomb's trajectory is roughly parabolic, when the bomb is dropped from high altitudes it may reach terminal velocity before hitting the ground. This affects the final trajectory in a non ...
An early bombsight, 1910s 1923 Norden MK XI Bombsight Prototype. A bombsight is a device used by military aircraft to drop bombs accurately. Bombsights, a feature of combat aircraft since World War I, were first found on purpose-designed bomber aircraft and then moved to fighter-bombers and modern tactical aircraft as those aircraft took up the brunt of the bombing role.
Aerial bombs include a vast range and complexity of designs. These include unguided gravity bombs, guided bombs, bombs hand-tossed from a vehicle, bombs needing a large specially-built delivery-vehicle, bombs integrated with the vehicle itself (such as a glide bomb), instant-detonation bombs, or delay-action bombs.
So, for instance, if a given bomb had a lower terminal velocity than another it would take longer to reach the ground, which is the same as the other bomb being dropped from a slightly higher altitude. Adjusting the altitude accounted for this. [33] After bombs are released, drag causes them to fall behind the motion of the aircraft.
A similar technique was mast-height bombing, in which bombers would approach the target at low altitude, 200 to 500 feet (61 to 152 m), at about 265 to 275 miles per hour (426 to 443 km/h), and then drop down to mast height, 10 to 15 feet (3.0 to 4.6 m) at about 600 yards (550 m) from the target. They would release their bombs at around 300 ...
The first aggressive use of balloons in warfare took place in 1849. Austrian imperial forces besieging Venice attempted to float some 200 paper hot air balloons each carrying a 24–30-pound (11–14 kg) bomb that was to be dropped from the balloon with a time fuse over the besieged city.
The aim was to divert German night bombers from their intended targets so they would drop their ordnance over the countryside. The sites were an extension of Colonel John Turner's decoy programme for airfields and factories (code named "Q" Sites, probably by analogy with Q-ships [ 1 ] ).