Quote Originally Posted by Lawrence001 View Post
Ah so that's at full reheat, I read it as once at interception height it had 6 minutes of operational fuel before returning to base (rather like the ME263 which I think only had fuel for a couple of passes at the American bombers). Given its climb rate, it would only need full reheat for a couple of minutes (depending on how far over the North sea/wherever you want to get before intercepting them). When they had nuclear bombs you could get them pretty close to the UK so hopefully plenty of interception time before you only have enough fuel to get home. Once they had stand off nuclear missile capability (Kitchen was the main one IIRC) then it's not as simple, I don't know the range of those weapons.

We had air to air refuel tankers (Victors, again IIRC) but they would have to be up at height ready and waiting after the climb. Unless there was always one up there 24/7 then these wouldn't be much use, except for extending the Lightning's range for planned operations elsewhere in the theatre of operations.


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Yeah we also had Bloodhound SAM bases on the coast here as well. I think their range was 400 miles.