The Martlet projectiles that Dr. Bull used were both free flight and rocket-assisted and were fully instrumented. Not exactly the flimsy effort you have described!Bull was working on increasing velocity, and on a very low budget. He was about a year from putting a projectile into orbit when the US pulled his funding to avoid the embarrassment of someone actually agenting to orbit on a shoestring before our very expensive rocket program.
There was no attempt to maintain accuracy, and he was working with a very poorly constructed gun. Read the HARP* final report. The gun was made by welding two naval rifles together end-to-end and stiffening the assembly with guy wires. A purpose built tube could have done much, much better.
And his sabots were made of plywood. Constructed in a carpentry shop. Now I know that a "sabot" was originally a wooden shoe, but this was a quick & dirty expedient. A sabot made of modern aerospace materials would have a lot more uniformity and better accuracy.
If he had not been murdered, I think his guns would have produce astonishing results.
* This HARP is not the same as Obama's refinance program with the same acronym. It stood for High Altitude Research Project.
The Martlet projectiles that Dr. Bull used were both free flight and rocket-assisted and were fully instrumented. Not exactly the flimsy effort you have described!Just read your response a second time. Didn’t you know that the HARP barrel was reamed to be a smoothbore? There was never any reason to make system “accurate”: it was designed to fire almost vertically to attain the highest possible altitude, not to hit some target on the ground.
The HARP sent a 400 pound projectile to an altitude of 110 miles - hardly a Mickey Mouse operation!
The project was cancelled more because of friction between Canada and our government over Vietnam than by the insidious machinations of the Missile Lobby.
See my immediately prior post above, also take a look at Bull’s later career. His artillery pieces (the ones intended for combat) have not been as great as the legend surrounding Bull would have us believe.