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Hello everyone,
Today I bring to you another interesting and quirky set of vessels, in the form of the Sprengboot Tornado series. These boats were designed as a last-ditch effort of the Kriegsmarine to bring about effective anti-ship weapons. However, unlike a regular torpedo boat, these boats followed the principles of similar Italian and Japanese designs, particularly the Shinyo suicide boat. The only difference is that these boats were given an Argus As-014 pulsejet from a V1 flying bomb, and got to some great speeds. During testing it has been reported that the monohull Tornado was able to reach 60 knots! Of course, they were nearly impossible to control at these speeds and there were fears that they would easily capsize or go bow-under due to the thrust. After the capitulation of Germany in 1945, the only examples of the boats were destroyed and no pictures exist of them.
From what I have found, the "standard" Tornado was based off of the earlier Linse explosive boat and simply had the pulsejet mounted above the aft area. The catamaran variant was built from two floats taken from seaplane Ju-52s, with its pulsejet mounted with angled struts from each pontoon. Each pontoon would have been packed with 350 kg of explosives, with a total of 700 kg for the entire boat. Unlike the Shinyo, which is infamous for being piloted to the end, these boats were designed to be radio controlled after the initial pilots jumped out.
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