AGM-62 Walleye (Family)
The AGM-62 Walleye refers to several weapons in War Thunder. You may be looking for:
- The AGM-62A Walleye I (505 kg), the unpowered TV-guided munition equipped by the F-4E, or
- The AGM-62A Walleye I ER (510 kg), an extended-range version of the above bomb created by extending and enlarging the fins of the original Walleye I.
Description
The AGM-62 Walleye is a family of American TV-guided anti-surface weaponry, used in purposes such as elimination of large hard targets and enemy shipping. Type-classified as an Air-to-ground missile (AGM), the Walleye is in fact a glide bomb like the PC 1400 X (1,400 kg), more commonly known under the moniker of "Fritz-X". In War Thunder, it is primarily used in an anti-tank role, uncommon for the type in combat service since it was typically reserved for only the highest-priority of targets, such as enemy command and control centres, large enemy surface combatants, bunkers, and vital pieces of large, "hard" infrastructure such as the infamous Than Hoa Bridge (the Dragon's Jaw).
Developmental History
This section is meant to be on the developmental history of the bomb system. Operational history of the bomb will not be summarised here. For a summary on the bomb's operational history, consult the individual pages of the bombs themselves.
\The original concept of a glide-bomb was a bomb that was essentially equipped with wings to allow a bombardier in the cockpit of an aircraft to guide the bomb into the target by means of wires or radio control, typically by using a joystick. Examples include the early VB-1 AZON, which was in essence a bolt-on tail assembly for the AN-M65A1 thousand-pound general purpose bomb that could steer the bomb left and right, to the gargantuan VB-13/ASM-A-1 TARZON, which mated a radio-control system for an earlier development of AZON called RAZON to a massive British-designed 12000lbs Tallboy Bomb, designed to be dropped from the B-29 Superfortress. The two bombs, for their time, were relatively successful, but still exposed several inherent vulnerabilities to their design, much like the Fritz-X did to the Axis, and the British and American units that faced it.
The first problem was that in order to guide such a weapon, an aircraft must fly straight and level, as well as staying in a position where the bomb can still be seen from the bombardier's sight, or at the very least, the cockpit. The technology of the time limited the AZON and TARZON to Azimuth Only, which meant that the bomb required the bombardier to aim the bomb like a regular bomb, and then provide minor course corrections using the azimuth system. The bomb could not, for example, be steered into the path of an oncoming train, nor track and eventually hit a ship moving towards the dropping aircraft. AZON and TARZON were thus usually employed against large, wide targets, like railway bridges, marshalling yards, factories, and dams, with great success. Destroying a moving target was very much. Other attempts at self-guided bombs of the era, such as the ASM-N-2 "Bat", used radar. Radar technology, while having come far since the turn of the century, was very much still in its infancy compared to the modern day, and the Bat was easily confused by ground clutter.
The Walleye's genesis came about thanks to a TV-loving NAS China Lake engineer named Norman Kay. In his spare time, Kay enjoyed creating television sets, and in 1958, he developed a camera that could follow and trace moving items in a picture by using a "blip" that it could project. By using a piece of circuit-board, Kay had just created the first device capable of tracking moving objects by using the difference in contrast between said item and the background. Later refinements would follow, and with a team of fellow engineers including Jack Crawford, Dave Livingston, George Lewis, Larry Brown, Steve Brugler, Bob Cunningham and long-time friend William H. Woodworth, would engineer the bomb that would eventually become Walleye. Among other challenges that they faced and defeated were refining the bomb's trajectory, eliminating the use of vacuum tubes in order to both simplify production and to ensure that the bomb was capable of making the turns and twists needed by a guided weapon, and withstand the shock of carrier catapult takeoffs, and the dilemma of procuring funding- initially by wheedling funding away from the AIM-9 Sidewinder project, which was concurrent to the tv seeker's development. By 1963, the development of the bomb had become official, and after a period of competition between various firms, Martin-Marietta won the contract in 1966 for full-rate production.
The AGM-62 was engineered to have a link between the seeker and a small TV monitor in the launch aircraft's cockpit, which is what would be used to select the target for the seeker. In the words of one of the engineers- the seeker "wasn't smart enough" to know that "a bridge was a bridge", but it could use the contrast between the bridge and whatever surrounded it and home in on the patch of contrast differential. Proposed features for the first iteraton included a datalink, which would not be integrated on initial Walleye I variants.
Walleye I used a thousand-pound warhead from the Mark 83 1000 pound General-Purpose bomb, recently developed in the 1950s in response to the need for lower-drag bombs. The unit was initially powered by a heavy set of lithium-ion batteries, but these were soon replaced by a ram air turbine on the back of the bomb, giving it the distinctively large propellor, different from propellor-driven tail and nose fuzes on older GP bombs like the AN-M65A1 that its predecessors had used. Large, triangular fins driven by hydraulic actuators were attached onto the rear, allowing the bomb to move left and right, and stabilize on the target. The seeker was the first-ever fully solid-state TV camera in existence. The bomb was meant to incorporate a revolutionary new data-link feature to allow the pilot to aim and steer the bomb while in flight, but tihs feature was temporarily dropped due to time constraints. Later versions of the bomb would reincorporate this feature into the bomb, allowing mid-flight course corrections. The bombs would find great success in Vietnam, chalking up successful missions such as the final destruction of the infamous Thanh Hoa Bridge and several successful missions against power plants, including a raid that destroyed Hanoi's main source of power a mere two days after Ho Chi Minh's birthday. The bomb would continue to be used, including with the data-link upgrade, during the Gulf War in 1991, after which it was gradually retired from US Navy and Air Force service as newer warshots, such as the GBU-15, AGM-65, JDAM and improved Paveway Variants came into service, and improved targeting pods allowed for laser-guided bombs to be more easily guided onto target.
References:
- The Pursuit of Precision…Walleye, The TV-Guided Glide Bomb. n.d. [DVD] China Lake, California: Naval Air Weapons Division China Lake.
- Sherwood, J., 2008. Nixon's Trident: Naval Power in Southeast Asia, 1968-1972. Washington, DC: Naval Historical Centre.
- Parch, A., 2020. Martin Marietta AGM-62 Walleye. [online] Designation-systems.net. Available at: <http://www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/m-62.html> [Accessed 21 December 2021].
