This is missing the manned surface-to-air missile, one of the most batshit concepts of WW2 imo:
"The primary role of the relatively untrained pilot was to aim the aircraft at its target bomber and fire its armament of rockets. The pilot and the fuselage containing the rocket engine would then land using separate parachutes, while the nose section was disposable."
I was picturing something more like a Kamikaze.
The flower is very kawaii.
You're thinking of the Reichenberg-Gerät, although the Nazis were crazy they weren't crazy enough to actually use it.
IDK the reason they didn't deploy that thing, but it certainly wasn't prudence or concern for pilot safety because the Me163 rocket plane was used.
The Me163 was supposed to be reusable, including the pilot, the Reichenberg was one time use only, including the pilot.
The Me163 was supposed to be reusable, including the pilot
The pilot was reusable, if you count fertilizer as a re-use.
The pigeon-guided bombs were more batshit, although paradoxically probably a lot more practical.
Wow! I was just watching the anime, Saga of Tanya the Evil, and it had these in it. I assumed it was anime craziness.
Natter indeed.
Nonshitpost comment: A video I like to recommend on tank production illustrates the differences in mindset for industrial production.
Summary is that the US had mastered assembly line production and the use of subassembly parts to minimize production time. The US military had a centralized body to evaluate and approve different variants, which meant production stayed smooth.
The Soviets lacked experience with this kind of mass production by they quickly caught on and adapted in a logical way. They used assembly line production, but didn't use subassemblies from different factories, as that would clog up their rail lines and spread out the factories needed to be defended. Instead they centralized so that trains brought raw materials to factories and left with finished tanks.
The Germans built tanks with a team of people who would continually work on one tank, crafting it. This was much slower. There was also too much of a direct line between many different military commanders and the tank production, allowing commanders to constantly put in their own personal special requests, further slowing down production as so many tanks had to have special modifications (that weren't important to the big picture).
I've seen (what I think is) a different video that made a similar point. I wish I could remember it well enough to find it again.
This is missing a picture of an American shipyard and an ice cream barge. The Japanese really didn't have a hope of winning. We were adding multiple aircraft carriers per year to the fleet, and more each year than the last. So they'd sink one and it would be replaced by 3 more.
an ice cream barge
For those not familiar, the WW2 US Pacific fleet included, no joke, a barge originally built to deliver and mix massive amounts of concrete that was refitted with food grade surfaces and a huge cooling system to supply ice cream throughout the fleet. I mean, it was navy "ice cream" from powder, but it was still a luxury that boosted morale wherever it went. I can only imagine how much it would have hurt Japanese morale if they had found out the US had so much resources to spare that they could waste them on industrial quantities of frozen treats.
I knew NCD would get it.
What the fuck was that in the last panel.
Gun large enough to hit London. The barrel had to be so long that they built it into a hillside to keep it supported
Hmm. I'm guessing they had problems with getting enough propulsion going? The modern approach would involve some very synchronized stages, but WWII tech would make that difficult.
Otherwise, this would be a pretty cheap way of doing the Blitz.
They were doing exactly that. The pairs of pipes coming out the sides of the barrel are more charges, being timed to go right after the projectile goes through.
Didn't work well also barrel life of like 5 shots and you can't aim it or move it. Dumb, like everything they did.
Yeah. Now it'd be easy to programmably trigger each charge on the order of microseconds or less, and we can make some pretty fast-shutting valves. Barrel wear is harder and would probably involve simulational fluid dynamics. More likely we'd just build a coilgun, which removes that issue very nicely, and uses similar control electronics.
Of course, if you want to destroy a city there's also nukes now, and anything else tends to either move or be very well protected. People have talked about this for space travel, but the trade-off between G-forces and length hurts at least as much as the rocket equation (despite being "only" quadratic instead of exponential).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Babylon
if you're interested, a more modern take on the concept was attempted using conventional explosives.
The atomic bomb. Very powerful.
What, you weren't reading it right to left like a manga? /s
The wunderwaffe was a last ditch propaganda attempt to boost morale of the Germans. Which kind of worked because many Germans still believed in the "final victory" with wunderwaffes along the way to save them, in spite of the Allies being at the gates of Berlin.
There is another: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistel
Leave it to the Germans to name their weapon after what was used to kill the diety EVERYONE liked. (Balder)
The Germans were notorious for using on-the-nose naming conventions. For example a radio-homing system was called "Odin", which the British correctly guessed was using one transmitter rather than the usual two because Odin only had one eye.
The lesson here is that when picking code names, pick random words from the dictionary.
Is “engine life of five hours” correct? Would the engine need replacement after five hours of flight time? Damn, that sucks.
One of the under-appreciated benefits of the Allies' successful invasion of North Africa was that it cut Germany off from their main sources of stuff like chromium, cobalt and nickel, elements that are alloyed with steel to produce material that can resist the kind of high temperatures that jet engines produce. This forced them to manufacture turbine blades from ordinary steel, which doesn't work very well.
Anyone have a guess as to what the bottom left picture might be? Just looks like some weird stairs.
PING!
Also, let's not forget "Tank that doesn't murder the crew when it's mission-killed" and "Jeep"
We did have the Mark 14 torpedo, in the "disaster" category.
Germany had her own torpedo problems, but the Mark 14 went out the door in abysmal form, and we were extremely slow to get the problems fixed. And we were fighting a war with more naval focus than was Germany.
And while we had some work on the VT fuze and would have eventually gotten there ourselves -- though time is valuable in a war -- that was really the Brits. They gave us their work and we finished the work to put it into a shell.
And some of our concepts, though we ultimately made use of them in some way, failed in their original form.
The idea that ships would be a sitting duck for high-altitude level bombers was just wrong. Down the road, yes, but not in WW2. Billy Mitchell really oversold the state of things. And while it wasn't catastrophic for us, it did hurt our initial ability to respond to naval forces.
The B-17 concept that massive interlocked fields of fire from defensive guns would permit bombers to sail past fighters didn't really work. It was in a stronger position than the Avro Lancaster for daylight bombing, but we took horrendous losses; ultimately long-range fighter escort was still required.
The Norden bombsight didn't really deliver the tremendous advantage that had been expected.
We initially drastically overestimated what our early radars could do for us in naval night-fighting, and it led to things like the Battle of Savo Island. The Brits seriously bailed us out here with the cavity magnetron.
Germany also had some significant wins. Yeah, they didn't have the semi-auto rifle as a standard issue, whereas we had the M1 Garand. But they did have the assault rifle, in the form of the StG 44. They had the general-purpose machine gun in the form of the MG 34.
Needs 3000 of what, to operate?
Just 3000 of whatever you have on hand, generally
Of course the pic of the long-range fighter is a P-51, which always gets all the credit for that shit. But the P-47N was built to escort B-29s all the way from the Marshall Islands to Japan and back, and had a range in the neighborhood of 3000 miles - simply astonishing when you consider how short-legged fighters were at the beginning of the war (Battle of Britain Bf109s could barely make 400 miles).
Great point, especially towards fans of nazi overfucked tech
I wouldn't mind a fighter with the range of a bomber. I end up never using fighters unless I'm being invaded because of its short range, but the initial biplanes can only be remodeled into fighters so I'll end up having a couple of them every time. I still need to give the P-51 mustang a try, they seem to have a slightly better range.
Tank destroyers with rotating turrets.
But also topless, because what are mortars and hand grenades?
Cue !MilitaryMoe NSFW in 3...2...1...
There were really two different groups of tank destroyers in WW2.
The US and UK wanted something that would prevent a situation akin to what came up in the Battle of France, where fast-moving German armor penetrated French lines at Sedan and performed a successful massive exploitation through that breach.
They had fast vehicles that were intended to fight from concealed, defensive positions. But those vehicles had to be able to get out in front of an armored breakthrough in time to parry the thrust. What was critical was speed.
Germany and the Soviet Union, out on the Eastern Front, needed heavily-armored vehicles with big guns to slug it out over open fields with long fields of fire.
While, yes, both were aimed at fighting armor, they weren't really aimed at the same role, and I kind of wish that the two groups of vehicles had gotten different names, rather than "tank destroyer" being applied to both.
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