as it was; if they'd had the foresight to keep those researchers in Germany, or grabbed them from other countries before they could escape to Britain or here...This thing had a 800mm- 31.5"- bore, fired a 5.25 ton HE or 8.25 ton AP shell up to 29 miles for the HE, 23 for the AP, muzzle velocity around 2700fps. Damn.
The good thing about this? Hitler & Co. had people and other resources tied up with crap like this instead of working on other things. As was they developed the first tv-guided bomb and a lot of other things, so any oversized time-consumer like this was a Good Thing for us.
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And so it goes for all forms of discrimination. When you discriminate, for whatever reason, religious, racial, ethnic, sexual, etc. you remove that groups intelligence, innovation, capabilitys from your talent pool.
Pretty soon you've severely limited yourself. Hmmmm, maybe you might even lose the war.
While the Krauts made the first TV guided bomb, we were so close behind that it made no difference.
The TDR-1 TV-guided drone bomb was in operational testing by 1942.
(What really won the war was logistics more than technology - apart from RADAR, which was just immense.)
The engineer who managed the design, development, production and all the after sales service for Bristol Engines (big radials, the later ones with sleeve valves), did a report for the British Government on allied production of aircraft (Bristol's directors had sacked him in the middle of WW2).
He took great care to have each copy given security codes, so if one was leaked, they would know where it had come from.
After the fall of Germany, he was sent on a trip to loot whatever he could of new German developments. When he got there, US guys had beaten him to most things and people, they also relieved him of what little he did find!
He met one of his German engineering friends from pre war days, who gave him some goodies, clearly showing that the next generation of German fighters would have given them air supremacy, however, after reading Feddon's report, they all lost heart, as they knew that they would be defeated long before they could get the planes into production.
Apparently someone in intelligence realized that the demoralizing value of giving the Germans the report out weighed any use they could make of it in the time left before being over run.
When Feddon got his remaining loot home, he organized meetings for British manufacturers, to show them the German developments. They laughed at the silly cooling air holes in gas turbine blades, and at the stupid looking beetle car - which would obviously never sell, after all, the German's engineering had lost the war...
Roger, I think the first time I read an actual statement on this was from Heinlein, something like "It could be said that by losing about a dozen key people the Germans lost the war."
Yeah, some things we were ahead on, some behind. I think I read somewhere they were about to start using the first radar-guided SAM at the end, and were working on a stealth bomber. And it's amazing how badly Not Invented Here can keep even quite smart people from seeing a good idea. Or admitting to it.
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