this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
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NonCredibleDefense

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[–] [email protected] 80 points 2 months ago (5 children)

This is missing the manned surface-to-air missile, one of the most batshit concepts of WW2 imo:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachem_Ba_349_Natter

[–] [email protected] 55 points 2 months ago (2 children)

"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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

I gotchu:

That is the Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka, a Japanese kamikaze rocket plane

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

~~rocket plane~~ human-guided missile

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

The flower is very kawaii.

[–] Shipgirlboy 21 points 2 months ago (4 children)

You're thinking of the Reichenberg-Gerät, although the Nazis were crazy they weren't crazy enough to actually use it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Shipgirlboy 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The Me163 was supposed to be reusable, including the pilot, the Reichenberg was one time use only, including the pilot.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago

The Me163 was supposed to be reusable, including the pilot

The pilot was reusable, if you count fertilizer as a re-use.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago

The pigeon-guided bombs were more batshit, although paradoxically probably a lot more practical.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

Wow! I was just watching the anime, Saga of Tanya the Evil, and it had these in it. I assumed it was anime craziness.

[–] Gurei 4 points 2 months ago

Natter indeed.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

Does anyone else remember BF1942: Secret Weapons? This shit was a riot to cruise around in

[–] [email protected] 50 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

I knew NCD would get it.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (2 children)

What the fuck was that in the last panel.

[–] mnemonicmonkeys 37 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Gun large enough to hit London. The barrel had to be so long that they built it into a hillside to keep it supported

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (10 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

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).

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The atomic bomb. Very powerful.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

What, you weren't reading it right to left like a manga? /s

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I will not hear sass directed at my best boy Schwerer Gustav

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Leave it to the Germans to name their weapon after what was used to kill the diety EVERYONE liked. (Balder)

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Saledovil 6 points 2 months ago

The lesson here is that when picking code names, pick random words from the dictionary.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Is “engine life of five hours” correct? Would the engine need replacement after five hours of flight time? Damn, that sucks.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

It was more like 10-35, but it appears to be a reference to the Junkers Jumo 004.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (5 children)

PING!

Also, let's not forget "Tank that doesn't murder the crew when it's mission-killed" and "Jeep"

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Anyone have a guess as to what the bottom left picture might be? Just looks like some weird stairs.

[–] Shipgirlboy 28 points 2 months ago

That's the Kanone V-3, a super long range artillery gun intended to shoot at London.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago

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).

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Needs 3000 of what, to operate?

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Just 3000 of whatever you have on hand, generally

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Well, I have this bag of rice...

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

Great point, especially towards fans of nazi overfucked tech

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Tank destroyers with rotating turrets.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

But also topless, because what are mortars and hand grenades?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

Cue !MilitaryMoe NSFW in 3...2...1...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

To be fair I believe the Wehrmacht really wanted to move to issuing more small arms like the G43 and the STG/MP44 but Hitler was shortsighted and spiked the STG44 project personally.

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