Bloodhound (missile)
1950s surface-to-air missile system by Bristol
The Bristol Bloodhound is a British ramjet powered surface-to-air missile developed during the 1950s. It served as the UK's main air defence weapon into the 1990s and was in large-scale service with the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the forces of four other countries.
Part of sweeping changes to the UK's defence posture, the Bloodhound was intended to protect the RAF's V bomber bases to preserve the deterrent force from attacking bombers that made it past the Lightning interceptor force. Bloodhound Mk. I entered service in December 1958, the first British guided weapon to enter full operational service. This was part of Stage 1 upgrades to the defensive systems, in the later Stage 2, both Bloodhound and the fighters would be replaced by a longer-range missile code named Blue Envoy. When this was cancelled in 1957, parts of its design were worked into Bloodhound Mk. II, roughly doubling the range of the missile. The Mk. I began to be replaced by the Mk.
The public source identifies “Bloodhound (missile)” as 1950s surface-to-air missile system by Bristol. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Bloodhound, missile and 1950s.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bloodhound (missile)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.