Axis secret weapons: big, loud, wastes of resources and manpower that have no real effect on war.
>Maus, V1, V2, 262, 163, Yamatos, carrier subs
American secret weapon: the size of a radio tube and has a drastic effect on the war by increasing artillery killing power tenfold.
the 262 was Germany's best option for long-term air defense and was head and shoulders better than any allied fighter. if anything it needed to be wunderwaffed harder
Short engine life, very vulnerable on takeoff and landing, prone to burning/exploding, constantly interfered with by 'Dolf ("Muh fighter-bomber!!!").
it could destroy more B-17s per airframe hour than any other aircraft in service. that's literally all that mattered for Germany after 1942
>very vulnerable on takeoff and landing
every plane is vulnerable on takeoff and landing, dumbass
Yeah, but a 190 or 109 can quickly reaccelerate on landing to deal with unexpected Mustangs. Go ahead and gunn the engines on a 262 and see what happens.
Is that something that ever needed to happen or is this post war speculation? That sounds like some kind sight bullshit if I've ever heard it. Like hellcats being penetrated from the side by mg's
Jagdverband 44 flew a mixture of Me-262s and Fw-190Ds, the latter of which were used as a CAP over their own airfields to keep the Me-262s from being picked off during approaches.
>Short engine life,
Comparable to late war BMWs and DBs.
Less than 100 hours was the norm for most jet engines pre-1950s but liquid cooled piston engines in fighters weren't far better.
Not good when your industry is running on fumes and slaves.
Under that condition jet engines run better than piston engines.
The mistake with their turbojets was the axial compressor, they thought too ahead in a era were centrifugal still were superior.
Some problems of the Me 262 could had been solved with RATO + airbrakes but Germany had a serious shortage of engineers and a lot of useless projects.
No. Germany should have prioritized piston engine development and strategic bombing. They started with the edge in these things and fell behind the allies because they leaned into building jets.
If they were going to do what they did, they should have chosen the He-280 over the Me-262, it wasn't quite as good but it would have been ready almost a year and a half earlier and they could have built hundreds more than they did to have an actual impact on the air war instead of just a scary wunderwaffe story to scare junior airmen.
>They started with the edge in these things and fell behind the allies because they leaned into building jets.
They leaned into jets because all their large radials development failed during the late 30s and the V12 were expensive and unreliable if you can't use strategic metals (like stellite alloy). Trying to compete against RR-Bristol or PW-Packard would have been a waste of time and resources.
Germany only had some advantage with fuel injection and hydraulic clutch superchargers. Their problem with jet engines was preferring axial over centrifugal turbojets and the complete absence of any turboprop (even Hungary was testing one).
Yeah, turboprop was the way to go for them. Should've "borrowed" the Hungarian tech.
>was head and shoulders better than any allied fighter.
lmao
>>Maus
no shit, a lumbering prototype had no effect
>>V1, V2,
the V2 was very successful compared to the V1 and paved the way to modern cruise and ballistic missiles
>>262
what? the 262 proved that jet fighters were a viable aircraft, despite its terrible faults due to the lack of resources afforded to it
>>163,
yeah this volatile ball of hypergolic fuel didn't do much
, carrier subs
neither of these were "secret" or "wonder weapons"
>we built the true first jet fighter!
>but never put it into service
>but never put it into service
Sorry there weren't any German bombers to intercept by that point, leading them to be stuck hunting V1s.
Acceleration was relatively shit and their turning radius was massive too, if they got dropped on by an Allied piston aircraft they were fricked.
Perfectly fine for bomber hunting though.
perhaps I can interest you in the enigma machine. it sounds like exactly what you want from your secret wonder waffle
Broken/decoded. May I interest you in a code that's also encrypted into a language unknown by anyone on the opposite side?
Unlike Enigma, the American SIGABA was never successfully decoded by an enemy.
SIGABA BALLS
Who the hell is Alan Turing?
A homosexual who invented electronic computers and helped crack Enigma.
Btfo by a guy who took it up the ass
This is what Germany needed. Radar controlled AA, this is 120mm American AA.
I love the skysweeper, such a cool looking system.
Here it's in transport mode
Just look how it mogs the 88 in the background
I think that's a US 3-inch AA gun
Germany had a multi level and interconnected network of radars and flak.
(after min 9:00)
Wasserfall AA rocket
German flak bateries already had automated gun laying with different input methods. Their timed fuzes were shit to the point where they realized just using impact fuzes are better.
AA-rockets would have been a gamechanger with maybe a ir seeker but Germany didnt have the time
dont forget the mk1A firing computer
America was truly fighting on a whole new level. You look at USMC in '41 and it's basically 1918 level. By '45 they look more like Vietnam era Marines.
probably because nobody could reach them
they had a large industry, a lot of scientists, and a focus on weapons as a system over individual weapons
So did Germany but they had a lot of political and commercial infighting, plus were unfortunately in bomber range
>So did Germany
not anywhere close to the US in those regards
V1 could have had a major effect on Britain if it had been developed earlier and entered service by 1940. The Bongs were very lucky that right as the first V1s were beginning to trickle in, a large, long-planned delivery of 90mm AAA guns with mass quantities of proximity fuzes was set to arrive. These guns were able to deal with the majority of V1s. In 1940, it would have been much more difficult, and England would have faced the prospect of suffering through the attacks for years.
Also, if you're talking wastes of resources, you have to mention Germany's surface fleet, which accomplished little other than aiding the initial conquest of Norway.
Would an v1 and v2 been more effective with an proximity fuse for airburst?
Easy to jam. A cluster warhead could have been interesting.
No. Airbursts are for troops in the open, or in uncovered trenches. For bombing cities, you want a delayed impact fuze.
And the V2, while a technological marvel, was absurdly expensive for what it offered. V1s, on the other hand, were cheaper and more effective at pounding a city than Germany's medium bombers. And in 1940, without fast prop and jet fighters capable of intercepting them, or radar-aimed AAA firing proximity-fuzed HE at them, England would have been very hard-pressed to deal with them in any sort of reliable manner. Imagine a Blitz that persisted at near-BoB levels for 4 years without pause, without even risking German pilots or planes. Thankfully, by the time the V1 entered service, there were already options available to reduce their effect.
I meant wouldn't the v1 & 2s cause more if they blew up just above structures?
What do you think is going to cause more damage, a bomb blowing up in a building or above the building?
Although the V2 didn't help it did become the standard for warfare later on. Hell the Soviet Union R-1 was just a copy of the V2.
>America's Secret Weapon: British Elite Capture fortifying FDR's last election; inserting hordes of Soviet agents in the Administration & federal bureaucracy; helping place Klaus Fuchs & co. into the Manhattan Project
If Stalin had declared ceasfire for two years while Jets go fully operational, you have a big problem. Then there's the subs fitted for V1s delivering thermobaric very dirty bombs along the New England & British coasts. There were plenty meme ideas but they needed overmatch to prosecute the war.
Italy should have stayed neutral and then profit post war with the allies scrambing to counter the soviets.
By staying neutral all of their infrastructure, cities, ports, armies, navies would have remained intact while the British were selling the clothes off their backs to avoid homeless.
Italy could have been the gateway with infrastructure for marshal plan, their men & women could have benefited off the reconstruction effort.
That would have required not putting a nutjob failed-actor socialist in charge.
All they had to do was pull a Spain, just sit on his ass and do public works. Could have even paid the debt off of the public works post-war.as long as they didn't goo too full moron with racking up the debt, and they could have paid it off by charging allies money for ports and other things.
All he had say post-war to the press is "We had a lot of domestic issues that made us too occupied for war and Germany's past performance wasn't so hot."
Or Victor Emanuel actually having a spine.
One of the greatest Ironies is that if Germany had delayed Barbarossa for another year to wait after the delays in Afrikan theatre the T-34 line would've most likely been canceled in favor of KV series of tanks. This would've also resulted in a gimped Tiger I with lack of experience going against the KV's but should still put Germany in a better position with their less cluttered tank formations and radios.
>Axis secret weapons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauser_MG_213
I wonder why the Germans pussed out with Chlorine Trifluoride and refused to Wunderwaffe it. They were happy to melt their own pilots with super acid powered rocket ships but apparently CIF3 was a step too far for them?
Germany should have fielded their hard counter to piston engine bombers - the R4M 55mm rocket - in 1940 instead of 1945.
They kinda soft countered bombers in 1943 with just fighter cannons.
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/black-week-darkest-days-us-army-air-forces
USAF suspended deep raids until February 1944 when they came back with Mustang escorts.
>American secret weapon
>VT fuze
But the circuitry design for the VT fuze was given to America by the British. America merely produced it en mass for various shell types
The British only had ideas about proximity fuzes and they had access about different german designs through intel (ie Oslo Report).
The never did something similar to the VT fuze nor could they have done it during the war.
The same could be said about radars with aerodynamic PESA antennas. In electronics the US was way ahead than any other country.
>The British only had ideas about proximity fuzes
Britain provided full circuit designs for the RF proximity fuze and the whole thing depended on the cavity magnetron that Britain invented in 1940 and shared with the US in the Tizard mission
The US didn't have the technology to build miniaturised radar systems until Britain shared their technology.
Then being the fat fricks they are, some guy at Raytheon working on these VT fuzes wondered how he could use the cavity magnetron to cook food, and ended up inventing the microwave oven.
Not only they never relied on magnetron but it would be useless, the VT operated in the VHF band (~200 MHz iirc). A 200 MHz magnetron would be 'huge'
>depended on the cavity magnetron
Opinion discarded, completely.
British proximity fuse tests were carried out on rockets. They didn't know if the fuses could be made to withstand violent acceleration from a gun. American labs made them work with arty.
>not mentioning the Haunebu for the Axis
The thing was practically untouchable barring the one time the Swedes shot one down doing an overflight in 1957. The US didn't catch up technologically to the Nazi remnants until they recovered one that malfunctioned over Kentucky in 1965. Had the Nazis perfected them while they still had Europe instead of having to complete the few examples in the Neuschwabenland base, they would have ha utter air dominance and maybe some of their other weapons could have came to fruition.
A lot of this was due to the fragmentary nature of German and Japanese R&D and command. The Nazis deliberately compartmentalized command simply so that no single commander could lead a coup. This led to a lot of projects being underfunded and undermanned.