Grace's Guide To British Industrial History

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Grace's Guide is the leading source of historical information on industry and manufacturing in Britain. This web publication contains 167,701 pages of information and 247,103 images on early companies, their products and the people who designed and built them.

Grace's Guide is the leading source of historical information on industry and manufacturing in Britain. This web publication contains 147,919 pages of information and 233,587 images on early companies, their products and the people who designed and built them.

Rolls-Royce Engines: Soar

From Graces Guide

Note: This is a sub-section of Rolls-Royce

The Rolls-Royce RB.82 Soar was a small, expendable axial-flow turbojet intended for cruise missile use and built by Rolls-Royce. It was developed in the early 1950s, and demonstrated at the Farnborough Air Show in 1953 on each wingtip of a Gloster Meteor flying testbed.

The output of the Soar was 1,750 lbf (7.8 kN). As an expendable device the life of the Soar engines was very limited, two or three hours at most.

It was to be the intended power-plant for the "Red Rapier" missile project, one of the projects coming from the UB.109T operational requirement. Red Rapier was to be built by Vickers-Armstrongs at Weybridge, Surrey as the Vickers 825.

Development was cancelled in 1953. Three Soar engines were used, two on the tips of the tailplane, and one on the tip of the fin. One-third scale models without engines were built and air launched from a Washington bomber (the Boeing B-29 Superfortress in RAF service) on the Woomera missile range to test the aerodynamics and autopilot operation.

As the Westinghouse J81 it was a power-plant for the US AQM-35 missile

It was an auxiliary power-plant for the Italian Aerfer Ariete fighter design and also considered as a JATO power-plant for other aircraft.


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