The V-9 performed better than the V-8, but not by much. Between 1965 and 1992 a handful of “meteors” fell within 20–40 miles of London and New York, causing minor damage.
Some commentators have claimed that the spectacular Chelyabinsk event of 2013 was a test firing of an improved V-9. The meteor — if that is what it was — has been estimated as being about 66 feet in diameter and weighing more than 13,000 tons when it struck the outer atmosphere. While both Russian and US intelligence sources publicly state that it was a natural event, there are rumors that it was really the first shot fired by an enlarged version of the V-9 gun, which has been tentatively designated V-10.
However, the fact that it struck some 1,500 miles east of Moscow and even further from any other large Russian city is thought to indicate that targeting problems have yet to be fully overcome. Nazi Germany had not developed any significant level of computer science by 1945, and analysts believe that the Walhalla base is still reliant on analog technology for long-range targeting calculations.
While the Vergeltungswaffen (Vengeance Weapons) program is best known for the V-1 cruise missile and the V-2 ballistic missile, it produced plans for weapons of many other types. Among the few actually built was the V-3 “supergun,” a 150mm cannon intended to bombard London from sites in occupied France.
The V-3 consisted of a long, fixed barrel set on a ramp or hillside. Multiple side-chambers were arranged along the length of the barrel, containing secondary charges (or, later, rocket boosters) which increased the speed of the projectile as it passed by. The smoothbore weapon fired a fin-stabilized 150mm shell with a range of around 100 miles.
Two V-3 sites in the Pas-de-Calais region were knocked out by Allied bombers before they could fire a shot; two other sites bombarded Luxembourg from December 1944 to February 1945 before being overrun by advancing Allied troops.
In 1929, the German physicist Hermann Oberth developed the idea of constructing a 330-foot wide concave mirror in Earth orbit. The curvature of the mirror would allow it to focus the sun’s rays on a single point on the Earth’s surface, creating enough localized heat to burn a city. Initially it was dismissed as science fiction, but Kammler took up Oberth’s idea and set up a secret research facility at the village of Hillersleben in Saxony to develop the Sonnengewehr, or “Sun Gun.”
Although no effective results had been achieved by the end of the war, captured German scientists claimed that the weapon was only five to ten years from completion. One major hurdle was the project’s reliance on the unfinished A-12 rocket to lift the components into orbit: it has been estimated that several hundred A-12 missions would have been needed to complete the mirror and its control mechanism. The July 23, 1945 issue of Life magazine carried an illustrated article on the mirror, including many details of its proposed construction.
Kammler initially developed the Sonnengewehr in parallel with the V-8 and V-9 guns, but after their disappointing performance the mirror project took on a higher priority. Instead of being constructed in space, the Sonnengewehr would occupy a crater, using the relative movement of Earth and Moon as a crude aiming mechanism just as the guns had done. Building on the lunar surface simplified construction considerably, and Kammler knew it would take the Allies much longer to reach the lunar surface than to achieve Earth orbit, giving the weapon a longer operational life.
The Sonnengewehr has a significant advantage over projectile weapons such as the V-9 because its beam of concentrated light can reach the Earth in under two seconds, compared to almost three days for a V-9 projectile. This simplifies targeting significantly, allowing a shot to be aimed using open sights without the need for complex calculations. However, it requires a precise alignment between Sun, Moon, and Earth, making its effective firing windows both narrow and infrequent.
In 2009, surveillance images showed a very large turreted emplacement under construction near the northwestern rim of the Aristarchus crater. Detailed analysis of enhanced images led to the conclusion that the mount was designed to hold a very large, single-barrel weapon which could cover the whole of the Earth.
At first, it was thought that the weapon would be an improved V-9 rail gun — perhaps even the V-10 that had long been predicted — but further study concluded that such a weapon would be too large for a turret mount to be practical, even in the Moon’s lower gravity. Instead, it seemed that the Black Sun was building a long-range energy-beam weapon capable of reaching the Earth.
Such a weapon — dubbed “GSK” (Grosse Kraftstrahlkanone) after the smaller weapons used for base defense — would not have the Sonnengewehr’s restricted firing windows or the V-9’s complex targeting calculations. Powered by a Glocke buried deep under its emplacement, it could be brought to bear on any city-sized target on Earth using an optical telescope, and fired at will.
Although details of the recent American drone campaign against Walhalla are highly classified, it seems likely that the threat of the GSK — a true Nazi “death ray” every bit as deadly as its comic-book precursors — led directly to the development of the MQ-14 Lunar Hawk drone and its deployment against Walhalla. If the GSK were ever to become operational, it would turn the Moon into a literal “death star” and allow the Order of the Black Sun to dictate terms to every nation on Earth — or to complete Nazi vengeance against Germany’s former enemies and return to rule the world.
Nazi Germany lagged behind the Allies — and particularly the United States — in the development of nuclear weapons. When the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, nuclear physics was one of several branches of research that were vilified as “Jewish science.” Einstein, who was visiting America at the time, did not return to Germany, and many other physicists and mathematicians left the country over the following years. After the invasion of Poland, many of those who remained were drafted into the army. It was not until 1942 that Germany truly began to take nuclear weapons development seriously.
SS E-IV removed as much nuclear research as it could from the experimental site at Haigerloch on the edge of the Black Forest, leaving behind one experimental nuclear pile and a handful of scientists who were captured by American forces. It had been planned to develop a nuclear warhead for the V-2, and for the planned A9/A10 “America Rocket,” but when Kammler activated the Bifrost Protocol, the warheads were far in the future and the rockets themselves had been lost when von Braun escaped into American hands with many of his key scientists.