Reich Ministry commissions surface to air missiles in 1941

Indiana Beach Crow

Indiana Beach Crow

Monthly Donor
oldironside said:
Was there any late war Wonderwaffe that actually worked properly?

Or, put it another way, was there any late war German weapon that the Allies would have swapped for one of their own?
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Well the US Army tried to copy the MG42, but failed to adjust for the differences between metric and standard measurements. None of the prototypes functioned correctly, and the project was abandoned. And the JB-2 Loon was pretty much a direct copy of the V-1 but the war ended before it could make it's combat debut scheduled for Operation Downfall. Other than that I can't think of a whole lot that they even tried to copy.
 
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Garrison

Donor
Indiana Beach Crow said:
Well the US Army tried to copy the MG42, but failed to correctly adjust for the differences between metric and standard measurements so none of the prototypes functioned correctly so the project was abandoned. And the JB-2 Loon was pretty much a direct copy of the V-1 but the war ended before it could make it's combat debut scheduled for Operation Downfall. Other than that I can't think of a whole lot that they even tried to copy.
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Yeah what the Germans had was a collection of interesting ideas that took time and money to make work, and the Third Reich was short of both those things.
 

Coulsdon Eagle

Monthly Donor
Indiana Beach Crow said:
Well the US Army tried to copy the MG42, but failed to adjust for the differences between metric and standard measurements. None of the prototypes functioned correctly, and the project was abandoned. And the JB-2 Loon was pretty much a direct copy of the V-1 but the war ended before it could make it's combat debut scheduled for Operation Downfall. Other than that I can't think of a whole lot that they even tried to copy.
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My understanding was that the MG42 became the blueprint for nearly every GPMG introduced in Europe, and influenced the M60. Generally considered to be one of the best MG's ever designed. But would you call it Wonderwaffe?

Panzerfaust as a cheap tank killer - could argue the forerunner of RPG's?

Generally the larger it got, the less effective it became seems to be the rule.
 

eltf177

Both the Panzerschrek and Panzerfaust worked well, but neither was truly late-war. Puppetchen appears to have worked but never got into production. The early Me-262's had a host of problems including a tailwheel. The V-2 program took time to get up to speed but they never did enough damage to justify the expense. The Me-163 was not a bad aircraft but there were never enough to make any sort of difference.

The He-162 was actually a fairly good fighter but the design had a number of problems:

1) Built by slave labor quality control was horrid
2) It was not an easy aircraft to fly, experienced pilots could make use of it but Hitler Youth trained on gliders would have died by the truckload
3) Lack of rubber forced the Germans to use a mix of recycled and ersatz rubber; this was OK for propeller fighters but jets tended to blow them on landings
4) Not available in any numbers so had no impact on the war
 

RamscoopRaider

Donor
oldironside said:
Was there any late war Wonderwaffe that actually worked properly?

Or, put it another way, was there any late war German weapon that the Allies would have swapped for one of their own?
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A couple, but they were niche things usually and not too impressive on their own, and aren't always included in the definition of "wunderwaffe"

IE the PAW 600 was an excellent light AT gun, but the Allies had enough prime movers they could just use Medium/Heavy AT guns for that

Likewise the MG 213 was a great autocannon, that served as the basis for most western aircraft guns in the 50's/60's, but was only really an incremental improvement

The German aerial rockets, R4M performed okay, but similar to allied equivalent and aren't always considered Wunderwaffe

Similarly the Fa223 and Fl 282 were decent helicopters for the time, but arguably the US R4 was better
 
Catsmate

Catsmate

Indiana Beach Crow said:
Well the US Army tried to copy the MG42, but failed to adjust for the differences between metric and standard measurements. None of the prototypes functioned correctly, and the project was abandoned. And the JB-2 Loon was pretty much a direct copy of the V-1 but the war ended before it could make it's combat debut scheduled for Operation Downfall. Other than that I can't think of a whole lot that they even tried to copy.
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Note how quickly the US cloned the V-1 and produced them in quantity.
 
oldironside

oldironside

eltf177 said:
Both the Panzerschrek and Panzerfaust worked well, but neither was truly late-war. Puppetchen appears to have worked but never got into production. The early Me-262's had a host of problems including a tailwheel. The V-2 program took time to get up to speed but they never did enough damage to justify the expense. The Me-163 was not a bad aircraft but there were never enough to make any sort of difference.

The He-162 was actually a fairly good fighter but the design had a number of problems:

1) Built by slave labor quality control was horrid
2) It was not an easy aircraft to fly, experienced pilots could make use of it but Hitler Youth trained on gliders would have died by the truckload
3) Lack of rubber forced the Germans to use a mix of recycled and ersatz rubber; this was OK for propeller fighters but jets tended to blow them on landings
4) Not available in any numbers so had no impact on the war
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I agree with a lot of what you wrote, but I have to take issue with the stuff about the Me 163.

If you wanted to design a weapons system that was impractical and dangerous, you would study the Me 163 programme to see how it was done.

The fuels were highly dangerous, highly unstable, difficult to manufacture and a nightmare to transport and store. The aircraft had no practical undercarriage, making take off difficult and leaving it totally exposed after landing until a tractor could get there, provided the plane didn't explode on touch down and the pilot didn't crack his spine. The cockpit had a habit of filling with steam. The pilot had to switch the engine off to conserve his meagre fuel supply, and was provided with a stop watch on the dashboard to help him avoid restarting to early. Not sure any patrolling P-51s would have been kind enough to wait around. The MK 108 cannon had too short a range and too low a rate of fire to actually hit any bomber reliably...

The 163 was a novelty, and an expensive and dangerous one at that. No way was it a practicle weapon.
 

Gunnarnz

oldironside said:
I agree with a lot of what you wrote, but I have to take issue with the stuff about the Me 163.

If you wanted to design a weapons system that was impractical and dangerous, you would study the Me 163 programme to see how it was done.

...

The 163 was a novelty, and an expensive and dangerous one at that. No way was it a practicle weapon.
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Worse or better, would you say, than the Natter?
 

Alex1guy

Alan said:
The Germans were ahead in avionics and aviation, submarine design, computing, jet engines, rocket technology, virtually every category of weapons technology including chemical warfare, radio navigation, radar countermeasures, and infrared night-fighting technology. The Germans had several proximity fuses, some of them more advanced than the Allied ones, but they remained as prototypes. The Allies were ahead in terms of nuclear weapons and radar, because of the cavity magnetron, and that was about it.
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Fundamentally, there are two things to understand about why the Germans lost WWII. Logistics and manpower (boring answer I know but that's it).

Tech wasn't going to win the Germans the war. They were fighting 3/4 of the planet, with all the resources and minds that entails. They themselves while having some very clever people working for them suffered from the simple fact, they were out manned, out gunned, out teched and out produced. Basically any tech can be simply countered by the Allies just producing more and more of, well, everything.

Germany's only slim chance of victory was dealing with their enemies individually (somehow). Once all three (being the USA, USSR and the British Empire) were involved at the same time, they were basically done. The disparity in resources was simply too much.
 
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Lucius Verus

Banned
What hasn't been brought up was the politics: that the true reason the Allies lost early-war was bad command and organization. It was just easier to blame better tech than admit that many of the same leaders that screwed up then were still in positions of power.
 
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eltf177

Gunnarnz said:
Worse or better, would you say, than the Natter?
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I used to think the Natter could have helped against the Allied Bombers. Then I read the new Osprey Publishing book on it.

The bomber streams would definitely alter course to avoid known large concentrations of Natter's. Then there was the problem of fueling. I see this being in a rush to get the Natter's fueled and ready to launch at the correct time (the Natter could not be fueled and left unlike a normal aircraft). And with C-Stoff and T-Stoff any spillage has the potential to be disasterous. I read that during the test flights after the first fuel was added the pad was carefully washed down before the second fuel truck came in. I just don't see this happening operationally, and with everyone in a rush the chance of an accident will greatly increase...
 

Cockroach

Alan said:
The Germans were ahead in avionics and aviation, submarine design, computing, jet engines, rocket technology, virtually every category of weapons technology including chemical warfare, radio navigation, radar countermeasures, and infrared night-fighting technology. The Germans had several proximity fuses, some of them more advanced than the Allied ones, but they remained as prototypes. The Allies were ahead in terms of nuclear weapons and radar, because of the cavity magnetron, and that was about it.
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Aviation? Marginally... They had an operational jet fighter slightly earlier, but otherwise, well, horribly behind in bombers both in number (handful of operational He-177s vs routine thousand bomber raids by both British and Americans) and tech (He-177 vs B-29...) and transports (Ju-52 vs DC-3...), and roughly equal in fighters.

Submarine design? Sorry to break it to ya, but a streamline high underwater speed submarine wasn't something that just popped up in Germans heads in 1943... The British had an operational class of such vessels back in WW1! So, the idea wasn't new, the German implementation of it IOTL is more a measure of desperation and failure of their conventional SSK operations...

Jet engines? Technically yes, axial flow did beat out centrifugal flow by the mid-1950s, but 1944-45 a centrifugal flow engine with useful service life in beats an axial flow engine that needs a rebuild after every third flight...

Radio navigation? 1940-43ish yes, but Knickebein; X-Gerat etc. required multiple beams per target. By 1943 the Poms had Gee and Decca in operation while the Seppos had the first generation of LORAN well under development. These systems were all MUCH more sophisticated, and the same transmitter network could be used for general purpose navigation rather than just a beam to follow to a single target and a second beam saying drop bombs now...

Proxy fuses? Using your so-called "logic", by the same measure (having a bench test cobbled together) the Poms had proxy fuses from 1939...

Of cause, you are someone who believes row boats abandoned on a beach are totally the same as ships sunk by air attack... TBH, your entire presence on this forum over the better part of a decade has been incoherent wehraboo ravings (I needed to go back to 2013 to find a post by you that wasn't "axis R gud" or "axis R winz"...), which naturally leads to certain suspicions about your sanity and/or politics.
 
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Alan

Cockroach said:
Aviation? Marginally... They had an operational jet fighter slightly earlier, but otherwise, well, horribly behind in bombers both in number (handful of operational He-177s vs routine thousand bomber raids by both British and Americans) and tech (He-177 vs B-29...) and transports (Ju-52 vs DC-3...), and roughly equal in fighters.

Submarine design? Sorry to break it to ya, but a streamline high underwater speed submarine wasn't something that just popped up in Germans heads in 1943... The British had an operational class of such vessels back in WW1! So, the idea wasn't new, the German implementation of it IOTL is more a measure of desperation and failure of their conventional SSK operations...

Jet engines? Technically yes, axial flow did beat out centrifugal flow by the mid-1950s, but 1944-45 a centrifugal flow engine with useful service life in beats an axial flow engine that needs a rebuild after every third flight...

Radio navigation? 1940-43ish yes, but Knickebein; X-Gerat etc. required multiple beams per target. By 1943 the Poms had Gee and Decca in operation while the Seppos had the first generation of LORAN well under development. These systems were all MUCH more sophisticated, and the same transmitter network could be used for general purpose navigation rather than just a beam to follow to a single target and a second beam saying drop bombs now...

Proxy fuses? Using your so-called "logic", by the same measure (having a bench test cobbled together) the Poms had proxy fuses from 1939...

Of cause, you are someone who believes row boats abandoned on a beach are totally the same as ships sunk by air attack... TBH, your entire presence on this forum over the better part of a decade has been incoherent wehraboo ravings (I needed to go back to 2013 to find a post by you that wasn't "axis R gud" or "axis R winz"...), which naturally leads to certain suspicions about your sanity and/or politics.
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I suppose I could be a closet Nazi, but I think my wife (black Afro-Caribbean) might have had something to say about it if I were . You chose your name well. It goes with your personality. Insults do not an argument make.
 

Garrison

Donor
Alan said:
I suppose I could be a closet Nazi, but I think my wife (black Afro-Caribbean) might have had something to say about it if I were . You chose your name well. It goes with your personality. Insults do not an argument make.
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True, but he did offer cogent arguments before the descent into some unfortunate insults, arguments which have also been put forward by others. Your assertions about the superiority of German technology simply don't stand up to scrutiny when you look at the record of the performance of Wehrmacht hardware in the field. Some of the things Nazi Germany tried technologically look dazzling but they were invariably overambitious, underperforming and ill advised.
 
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