Technological Development Without WWI

In what way isn't a Faster, more reliable, longer ranged airplane not a better warplane?

The FW-200 is a case in point. It was an excellent, fast, reliable, and long ranged airliner that (had WW2 not intervened) might have become the first and dominat transatlantic land-based airliner. As a warplane it simply sucked.
 
The FW-200 is a case in point. It was an excellent, fast, reliable, and long ranged airliner that (had WW2 not intervened) might have become the first and dominat transatlantic land-based airliner. As a warplane it simply sucked.

Granted. But would it's qualities as a warplane have been even worse if it was slower, less reliable and shorter ranged?
 
The FW-200 is a case in point. It was an excellent, fast, reliable, and long ranged airliner that (had WW2 not intervened) might have become the first and dominat transatlantic land-based airliner. As a warplane it simply sucked.

Granted, although I suspect that it would not be considered reliable if it were loaded as heavily as an airliner as it was as a warplane.

On the other hand was the FW200 a better warplane than a Gotha? And would something on the order of an FW200 have been developed without WWI?

Tom.
 
The FW-200 is a case in point. It was an excellent, fast, reliable, and long ranged airliner that (had WW2 not intervened) might have become the first and dominat transatlantic land-based airliner. As a warplane it simply sucked.

Nevertheless, the engineering and aerodynamic techniques and knowledge needed to build it, and many of the individual parts (the engines, for example), were probably very applicable to military aircraft design, even if the Fw-200 itself was not. For example, later on the Wasp Major (developed in part due to military demands) was used to power a number of airliners, while most early US jetliners used turbojets developed for military use. Clearly, things could go the other way as well, at least for bombers, reconnaissance aircraft, and the like.
 
I'd like to put out an argument that no WWI might actually have a slowing effect on a lot of non-military technology. My reasoning is more that:
-On the one hand, most of the countries in Europe were pouring huge amounts of money into mass armies. Witness the size of the German, Austrian, etc. armies in 1914 in Nations at War (a wonderful, albeit somewhat slanted, reference book from 1918 which I grew up reading): In many cases, the government was at least paying to train and equip 5-10% of their population. That's a lot of money being spent on a staring contest, and there's no reason to suggest that the numbers wouldn't have increased on this front over time absent a war to break the staring contest.
-On the other hand, there's a good deal of forced industrialization and centralization that WWI triggered. Mind you, many of the European countries were pretty industrialized already, but a lot of things had to be scaled up...and with it, a certain amount of reorganization took place (witness the British railroad industry...WWI basically caused the consolidation into the "Big Four", and WWII was a major factor in the formation of British Rail) as a result. Most of this probably would have happened anyway, but I think the argument is there to be had that the war sped a lot of things up through this sort of consolidation (not to mention some resulting standardization) in many countries.
--A knock-on from this is that losing the "War Socialism" test from 1917-19 would probably restrict the US government's efforts to consolidate the airline industry. Again, a shakeout was likely, but you get a lot of cases where 30 years' progress gets packed down into 5 (and there's always the chance that an ICC-esque regime gets started early on and the US winds up with 35 regional airlines in the 1950s...now there's a thought!). The side-effects on investment in passenger aircraft, at the very least (and possibly cargo hauling aircraft) could be rather substantial if there aren't a handful of big airlines which you can hope to sell a lot of them to.
 
640,000 Willys MB Jeeps were produced between 1941 and 1945. Now compare that to Model Ts, which in 1925 alone saw a production run of about 2,000,000, or 3 times the whole production of the Willys. Also, war is hell on those vehicles that would otherwise make a small but tidy profit based on innovation and the like.
 
Algeria and Libya are pretty much guaranteed to become flat-out French and Italian.

You mean they'd become majority European?

Large chunks of North Africa basically becoming a part of Europe would be an interesting development in a no WWI TL.
 
It's not like military development was stagnant and no investment in new weapons took place form the Franco-Prussian war to WW1. Case in point, battleships, which were advancing so fast new ones would become obsolete in five years and worthless in ten. The arms races would certainly leave money for all the ahead-of-time civilian advances to be applied to the military.

You don't need war to stimulate military development, just an intense rivalry like the Cold War, which was certainly there before the war.
 
Time for a little bump. I thought I'd write a bit about Vladimir Vernadsky. During the summer of 1917 he wrote about (I translated this from Swedish,. might diverge from original quote):

the concept of "living matter" as the totality of living organisms, irrevocably bound to the biosphere, and an inseperable part and function of it. [...] I started writing this in a feeling of excitement. It seems to me that as if this simple, new concept of living matter as the totality of living organisms which I introduced in geochemistry has saved me from the complications which is attached to present biology, where life is put forth as fundamentally opposite to non-organic matter.
He is on the verge of founding a new scientific discipline of biogeochemistry, which would mean a paradigm shift. The scientific basis for environmentalism would be laid many decades early. Alas, world war one and the Russian civil war meant the world did not gain as much from this great man as it could have.
 
To take advantage of the bump, I'll continue with my "technology - or at least military technology - would be severely retarded" arguments. I'd offer:

Bureaucratic and Industrial inertia. Military establishments in peactime are not geared toward innovation but in preserving existing investments. So are major industries. In a few instances (Fisher and the dreadnoughts) a nation makes a decision to render and entire class of weapon (predreadoughts) obsolete, but that is rare. Plus, it can be argued that the dreadnought principle was not so much revcolutionary but evolutionary. Absent WW1, existing classes of weapons would get incrementally bigger, faster, more capable, etc, but I'm less convinced that entirely new concepts could fight through the inertia.
 
Bigger, faster and more capable works for many things. Also, for Britain and France, no WW1 might mean not getting bogged down in the mindset of trench warfare, and thus a bigger move towards manoeuvre warfare.
 
One thing I don't see mentioned pertinent to aviation development.

WWI trained LOTS of aviators. It also built LOTS of airplanes (especially American which were just really gearing up in late 1918) that became surplus after the war. Especially in the U.S. these large numbers created a momentum all there own.
 
One thing I don't see mentioned pertinent to aviation development.

WWI trained LOTS of aviators. It also built LOTS of airplanes (especially American which were just really gearing up in late 1918) that became surplus after the war. Especially in the U.S. these large numbers created a momentum all there own.

WWI killed lots of aviators. More than 60% of Britain's aviators, and just under 40% of France's and Germany's. WWI created production facilities but the technological advances were minor. Junkers' cantilever wing was developed during the war, but not because of it. The Curtiss flying boat was scheduled for a trans-Atlantic attempt before the war, but was delayed because of it. The glut of war-surplus aircraft and engines slowed post-war development, which did not reach a new plateau until the 1930's.
 
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