[Bobsqueek]

I'd noticed before on pictures from the Korean war era of HVAR's with differently shaped, larger warheads.

Turns out that to cope with T-34 tanks the US forces were encountering and worried by reports of JS-3 tanks on railway cars on the trans-siberia railway supposedly en-route to Korea, a modifcation was made to the standard 5" HVAR, increasing it's warhead diameter by 1.5" and giving it a more pointed profile due to the shaped charge warhead. It became known as the ATAR and given the nickname "ramjet" or "ram"

http://www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/app4/ram.html

I've done a bit of digging and found out the first shipment of them reached Korea on 29th July 1950, pretty soon after the war started (http://www.history.navy.mil/wars/korea/chron50.htm) and seems logically to have been used by any type of aircraft that could carry the old 5" HVAR, up until the end of the conflict.

There doesn't seem to be a great deal of info in the way of tech or performance specs unfortunately, as it's development was rather rushed.

This link has an image comparing the ATAR to the HVAR, albeit probably pretty useless to a modeller given it's not to any scale or contains any size info

http://www.vectorsite.net/twbomb_06.html#m1

Pages 39 and 114 of this PDF document seem useful for a textual description and a schematic respectively:

http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=...tTRDoc.pdf

This document is interesting for those interested in US navy ops during the conflict:

http://www.history.navy.mil/a-korea/cv37...5feb51.pdf

Although it's worth noting that it seems only 70 were fired during the period the document covers (About a month), opposed to 2,800 of the normal HVARs. The rocket shows up quite commonly in the photo record of Korean ops across the US services and on a wide variety of aircraft. Many of the pictures i've seen show mixed loadouts of ATARs and HVARs, i'm not sure whether this was an intentional fit-out to give CAS aircraft more potency, or the ATARs were simply seen as interchangeable with the old HVAR, or used sparingly due to lack of supply.





Any thoughts?