Hello again everyone,
I was looking through my book "Warplanes of the Luftwaffe" by David Donald, and I was looking at the piece devoted to the Ta - 152. As I kept reading this I noticed that the development of the late war Jets and improvements on propeller driven aircraft came along as a result of hard times during military productions.
If Germany had stabilized the war situation, would these aircraft existed? or were they put forth because of those "hard times?" would Germany's peace time expendature eventually led to the development of the ME-262 and the ME - 163 and the Arado 234, etc etc etc.
How long would it have taken the government, military, and scientists to develop these aircraft compared to the time they were developed in war time and hard times?
Would Germany and the NSDAP funded a large scale jet propulsion system? and if not, what would they have continued on? what changed in the Luftwaffe could we see?
Thanks in advance
-Dan
Production development of Luftwaffe fighter planes.
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Dan Feltmate
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Dan :
Sionce you are talking about what if's, check this link for some intersting Luftwaffe a/c that might have been. in fact many were on the drawing boards back in 1943....... !
http://users.visi.net/~djohnson/luft46.html
enjoy the visual's
E
Sionce you are talking about what if's, check this link for some intersting Luftwaffe a/c that might have been. in fact many were on the drawing boards back in 1943....... !
http://users.visi.net/~djohnson/luft46.html
enjoy the visual's
E
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Scott Smith
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LUFTWAFFE WARPLANE DEVELOPMENT...
Dan,
There is some truth to that line of argument but (excluding fantasy things like flying saucers and so on) I think those were normal aviation developments, and not merely unique to pressures placed on Germany and the Luftwaffe.
However, necessity is the mother of invention and very often lack of quantity can be overcome by better quality.
During the war, there was a heavy push for higher and higher performance, regardless of the situation, and inevitably that will lead to jets.
The Germans had an incentive in addition to the general decline of Luftwaffe aerial superiority in developing the jet engine because they could deliver high-performances while burning cheap diesel fuel made from German coal instead of high-octane aviation gasoline made from expensive natural petroleum (only available from a few wells in Hungary and from Romania, which was eventually lost the the Axis).
The Luftwaffe did face the Allied bomber juggernaut, and this prompted the development of rockets and cannon to go after those bomber formations. At the end of the war, and too late, the Germans had developed an edge in heavy and long-range aerial weapons. This need was seen mostly in the nature of the air-air war more so than ground-attack however. The Germans even experimented with a 57mm cannon on an Me 262.
Allied tactical aircraft were routinely bombarding trains and positions with rockets, but their air-air weapons mostly relied on 0.50 cal machine guns. The Germans tried a 120mm Wehrmacht Nebelwerfer rocket fired from tubes on heavy fighters in the Fall of 1943 to break-up American bomber formation "combat boxes" of interlinked defensive fire, with partial success. The slower and less maneuverable attack aircraft were too vulnerable to enemy escort fighters.
The R4M 70mm rockets, placed on fast heavy fighters like the Me 262, could have defeated the Allied bomber fleets if introduced in early-1944 instead of April 1945. Twelve to twenty-four foldback-finned R4M rockets were launched in rapid succession (like birshot) from a wooden rail-rack, which was flat, and thus causing less severe aerodynamic problems than the Werfergranate 21 and its big launch tubes slung under the wings. In addition, the Ruhrstahl X-4 was a wire-guided air-air rocket with additional potential but too late to see action.
There is some truth to that line of argument but (excluding fantasy things like flying saucers and so on) I think those were normal aviation developments, and not merely unique to pressures placed on Germany and the Luftwaffe.
However, necessity is the mother of invention and very often lack of quantity can be overcome by better quality.
During the war, there was a heavy push for higher and higher performance, regardless of the situation, and inevitably that will lead to jets.
The Germans had an incentive in addition to the general decline of Luftwaffe aerial superiority in developing the jet engine because they could deliver high-performances while burning cheap diesel fuel made from German coal instead of high-octane aviation gasoline made from expensive natural petroleum (only available from a few wells in Hungary and from Romania, which was eventually lost the the Axis).
The Luftwaffe did face the Allied bomber juggernaut, and this prompted the development of rockets and cannon to go after those bomber formations. At the end of the war, and too late, the Germans had developed an edge in heavy and long-range aerial weapons. This need was seen mostly in the nature of the air-air war more so than ground-attack however. The Germans even experimented with a 57mm cannon on an Me 262.
Allied tactical aircraft were routinely bombarding trains and positions with rockets, but their air-air weapons mostly relied on 0.50 cal machine guns. The Germans tried a 120mm Wehrmacht Nebelwerfer rocket fired from tubes on heavy fighters in the Fall of 1943 to break-up American bomber formation "combat boxes" of interlinked defensive fire, with partial success. The slower and less maneuverable attack aircraft were too vulnerable to enemy escort fighters.
The R4M 70mm rockets, placed on fast heavy fighters like the Me 262, could have defeated the Allied bomber fleets if introduced in early-1944 instead of April 1945. Twelve to twenty-four foldback-finned R4M rockets were launched in rapid succession (like birshot) from a wooden rail-rack, which was flat, and thus causing less severe aerodynamic problems than the Werfergranate 21 and its big launch tubes slung under the wings. In addition, the Ruhrstahl X-4 was a wire-guided air-air rocket with additional potential but too late to see action.
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Cantankerous
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Re: Production development of Luftwaffe fighter planes.
Many Nazi war production facilities used for building Me 262s, He 162s, and other Nazi reactive propelled fighters (e.g. EF 126, P.1101, P.1077, Ho X, Ho XIII, P.13) were underground and were never bombed by the Allies, so it is possible that P.1101s, He 162s, P.1077s, EF 126s, P.13s and Ho XIIIs could have been fast enough to take down bombers and fighters of the Eighth Air Force as well as fight the P-80s and the XB-43. After all, on May 4, 1945 (four days before V-E day), a Heinkel He 162 scored its first and only victory over an Allied warplane when it shot down a Hawker Tempest.