In article ,
(Eunometic) writes:
(ArtKramr) wrote in message ...
Nuff said.


Arthur Kramer
344th BG 494th BS
England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany
Visit my WW II B-26 website at:
http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer

The Me 262 seems to have shot down 150 aircraft for the loss of 100 of
their own. Mostly shot up on landing or takeoff when they were even
more vulnerable to this problem than piston enginer aircraft due to
their slow throttle response. (A problem partially solved by the
better control systems on latter engines like the Jumo 004D as opposed
to jumo 004B4.)

It has little to do with throttle responce, and a lot to do with the
Thrust/Power relationship. It's a bit too late for me to type it all
in again tonight - but please do some googling in r.a.m. on the
subject.


This loss rate is a dismal record; it wasn't that the 262 wasn't a
good weapons system: it was simply outnumbered and heavily targeted by
the allies and also and quite a few losses were experienced on the
first missions due to the tactic of slowing down to take aim. It
wasn't untill tactics were worked out to solve this that effectiveness
improved.

And placed into service long before it should have been. Some
problems, like poor asymmetric handling at low speeds (One Engine out)
were endemic to the design. But there were other problems - high
speed snaking, and some rather ugly transonic behavior that should
have been resolved before service pilots were turned loose in it.
The Me 262 Pilot's Handbook has about 3 pages of handling
limitations. The F-80A Pilot's handbook has 2 flight limit entries.

You know, it's rather interesting that for all the work on high-speed
aerodynamics that the Germans actually did perform, they never seemed
to be able to translate it into the aircraft they built. The German
Aviation Military/Industrial Complex's solution to
compressibility/controllability problems in their airplanes was to put
a Big Red "Thou Shalt Not..." notice in the Pilot's Handbook. Compare
this to the work done in the U.S and Britain to sort out the
transonic problems that were occurring - the developmetn of the DIve
Recovery Flap (Which isn't a Speed Brake), improved control surface
geometries, and, for that matter, the inclusion of Speed
Brakes.

In technolgy the Germans and allies were closely matched. Both sides
produced major breakthroughs and both sides had areas where they fell
embarrasingly far behined.

The Germans were perhaps forced to focus on Break throughs because
resources were massively against them after 42 but in the end the odds
were against them. I do suspect that the breakthroughs would have
broken up the superiority of the allies in some areas. Jet aircraft
gave them a fresh start that would have equalised them where the
allies ahd piston engined superiority in quantity and quality. Sure
the allies would also have had jets but their existing technolgy would
have had its value wiped out and would have made useless almost all
piston engined aircraft: B26,A26,P47, B17,B24,B25 etc but they never
got enough of their jets going in time.

It's not that simple. There were a lot of factors - the most telling
of which were evident in 1936, when the Luftwaffe, and the other
German Armed Forces, cut back on armament production because they
didn't have enough raw materiels to use the factory capacity they
already had.
One of the other things they should have done was build up a better
training organization. A big limit was the lack of properly skilled
pilots. By late 1944, there weren't enough fully capable pilots to
make a differece, even if they were flying Mr. Arndt's Disks and
herding around Reptilicus. There's no point in making jet airplanes
if you have nobody who can fly them.

I don't like the "Allies Invented Everyting" nor do I like the
"Germans Invented Everyting" attitude. Anyone who knows how
technology advances should realise what one man can do another will
replicate almost immediatly. One of the mistakes of the Germans in
the Radar war was to put so much secrecy on their radar vulnerability
that they failed to develop effective countermeasurews to windows
jamming becuase the requise people weren't involved.
It should have been obvious that the British, who were behined in
Radar at the time would soon catch up.

That is a rather good example of the German's arrogance about their
own technology, and their "Mirror-Imaging" of how a particular
technology would be used. In 1939, and 1940 the Germans had the best
high-frequency radar around. Their main thrust for it, however, was
to use it to bulwark existing systems, specifically Antiaircraft and
Naval Fire Control. And they did this well.Once they'd figured out
that the long-wave pulsed signals that they were receiving was some
sort of radar, they absolutely knew that they were far ahead of teh
British, and didn't need to worry about it. What they missed,
however, was that those primitive, inaccurate long-wave radars were
part of an integrated Cammand and Control system that allowed RAF
Fighter Command to concentrate their forces with an efficency not seen
in aerial warfare before that time.
That same blindness - that belief that the German stuff was superior
because it was German, effected them in all areas.

Alexander the Great however with 50,000 men once defeated Darius's
army of 2-3 million with boldness and clever tactics.

Uhm, I don't think that ther were 2-3 million people in the entire
Persian Empire. Subsistance farming doesn't give you that sort of a
reserve.

--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster