Rolls-Royce Soar

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The Rolls-Royce RB.82 Soar was a small, expendable axial-flow turbojet intended for cruise missile use and built by Rolls-Royce Limited. 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.

[edit] Use

It was to be the intended powerplant for the "Red Rapier" missile project[1], one of the projects coming from the UB.109T operational requirement. Red Rapier was to be built by Vickers-Armstrong Ltd 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. [2]

As the Westinghouse J81 it was a powerplant for the US AQM-35 missile [3]

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