so was the Tiger Tank, the Bismarck and the V-Bombs
But I'm not just picking on the Germans here. Just because a weapon or vehicle has incredible performance doesn't make it effective.
Just look at everyone's favorite WW2 carrier plane the F4U Corsair. Except it wasn't much of a carrier plane in WW2 was it? No point in having a fighter that can exceed 450mph if it flips over and kills the pilot on takeoff, or completely lacks forward visibility on landings so it just crashes (and kills the pilot) or has nasty stall habits that (surprise, surprise) kill the pilot. I guess thats why the most successful Navy plane of all time just so happens to be the much slower F6F Hellcat, a plane designed around the difficult task of keeping inexperienced pilots alive long enough to become proficient.
With a tank like the Tiger One, how can anyone lose? It's simple, pay for it. A Panzer VI "Tiger" took over 300,000 hours of labor to build (compared to the mere 10,000 required to build a Sherman, or 7,000 for a T-34), it required highly skilled people to build it and it was too big to easily transport. That's probably why most of the Allied tanks in WW2 never even saw a Tiger, and instead had to fight Panzer IV and StuG III armored vehicles.
The Me-262 is a fan-favorite on this site, and with good reason. The world's first jet fighter was a lethal hunter of the skies. Fast, maneuverable, beautiful. But in a war of resources you're not going to win with a plane that chews through not one but two engines every ten hours. That's right, those cutting edge, high tech jet engines could only run for 10 hours before they had to be replaced. I can only imagine how many more desperately needed He-219's or Do-335's could have been built with the resources that went into their various jet programs.
And finally, the mother of all WWII boondoggles, the Bismarck class battleships. Only a leader as deluded as Adolf Hitler could have thought this was a good idea. 500 million reichsmarks, 82,000 tonnes of high grade steel and equipment for what? A short-lived "commerce raider" and a ship spent the entire war in port. For the same amount of money and resources, the Kreigsmarine could have been issued with 120 additional submarines at a time when uboats were literally Hitlers only hope of keeping America and England out of continental Europe.
What I'm trying to get at here is that there's more to this stuff than armor thickness, miles per hour and number of cannons. It's not just a money thing, either. America built huge (by WW2 standards) expensive submarines that could only dive a fraction as deep as their Kreigsmarine counterparts. But the US subs were well suited to circumstances in the Pacific Ocean and they crippled Japanese industry in exactly the way the Germans failed against England.
TLDR:
StuG > Tiger
Hellcat > Corsair
DB 603 > Jumo
Type VII > Bismarck
@MrVaultech Some of the real history is so preposterous, it would be hilarious if so many people hadn't been killed. "Hey guys, let's make tanks so big that we can't actually drive them anywhere!" But I do get your joke.
was kinda thinking you went along with the joke at first, but, like...
@F104Deathtrap
@MrVaultech "Stug VI" was called Ferdinand / Elefant. "Stug VII" was better, called the Jagdtiger. Well designed, impossibly hard to knock out from the front or sides. But super-heavy TD's are a nightmare to move, and many of them had to be abandoned by their crews for one reason or another.
Tomato potato we need a StuG VI then.
@F104Deathtrap
@MrVaultech StuG V was called the Jagdpanther. Ok, I'm stretching the truth a little because it was a purpose built anti-tank vehicle and not a multi-purpose Sturmgeschutz but it's pretty close. Wiki
Know for Germany, a majority of the later equipment they used was designed pre-war, but design periods were significantly rushed, and because of that rushed design period, they were forced to quickly change the desogns designs outside the original parameters.
That, and by the time they were introduced, the materials they were requiring for construction have been scarce for at least a year, leading to just worse performance.
Although Bismark was more of poor coordination, timing, and the German navy being too small for the given scenario of the time over production and supply issues, at least from my understanding.
Still waiting for that StuG V tho
@marcox43 I'd love to see what the Do-335 could accomplish at Reno!
@F104Deathtrap np! I'm a big fan of mechanical developments (especially german ones during WWII and their post-war derivates), also following the latest news on car engine tech, and dear lord, if we could rebuild those old engines with newer tech and more refinement, we could have some true beasts of engine, even revive some old engine models for recreative purposes. Who knows, maybe someone could recreate unfinished projects (Like Ta-183 or even more refined stuff like the Me P.1112) and make them race in Reno Airrace, I know that a DH Vampire held the title against brand new L-39's for quite a while, so it isn't all that imposible.
@marcox43 I'm glad you mentioned all these facts because they really help anyone reading this to get a clearer picture. I agree with everything you've said, 100% In no way am I suggesting that anything Messerschmitt or Junkers built was poorly designed. Quite the opposite, in my opinion. I just think it was the wrong tool for the job given the circumstances, and it was a tool ill-used by the German High Command.
Me 262 chewing through it's Jumo 004 is not much of a design flaw, but rather an entire lack of rare metals. that's why it could only go 12h safely and a max of 50h before exploding. A pair of Junkers Jumo 004 was entirely rebuilt by General Electric if I'm not mistaken (for the original airworthy Me-262 currently under restoration). those Jumo 004's with newer alloys now have an estimated service life before maintenance of 250h of flight time. Also, Jumo 004's costed way cheaper than BMW 801 or DB603 or Jumo 213 piston engines.
@BogdanX Given much more time and resources, the jet program would have more than paid for itself. The engines themselves were cheap and simple to produce compared the ultra-engineered big V-12 engines of the era. But the attrition rate was never solved during the war. Perhaps if the Germans applied some American-style mass production methods to the program, they could have made the attrition rate cost-effective. After all, you aren't losing the materials if the engine can be recycled.
This is all what-ifs, because the way the program was run and eventually implemented was a colassal waste of resources, manpower and expertise. That's what happens when the talent and strength of a nation is lead by deluded half-wits.
@WarshipDude They were 41,000 each x2 ships. As for the 'pocket' battleships, you are right on the money, German heavy cruisers were derisively called pocket battleships. My mistake.
@FishMiner Sorry, got the terminology confused with their heavy cruisers. I will edit.
@FishMiner same here, how can an 82.000T floating slab of steel be a pocket battleship XD, aren't they supposedly the Panzerschiff Deutschland Class?
Oh wow XD, well Bismarck is quite a flop as it was made when Battleship Era has about to end, bigger target, easier to hit, even i think about this when making my fictional country, i only have 17 BB, 5 sunk, the rest is either scrapped or museum ship...
@F104Deathtrap yeah, that's the vibe I got from the paragraph, it can also be looked at similarly to the Hurricane/Spitfire situation. The Spit, like the Corsair, was an objectively better aircraft, but deployed less, and was a less stable gun platform than the Hurricane
Bismarck class P O C K E T B A T T L E S H I P. Lmao you lost me there.
@PrinceZuko Yup, that's my point. Raw performance isn't everything. The USN had to train and deploy thousands and thousands of brand new pilots and the F4U was not the plane for that task.
Part of the reason the Hellcat was more successful than the Corsair was that it was in the war longer, was deployed in greater numbers, and was much more rookie-friendly. However in skilled hands the Corsair completely outstrips it in combat capability and flight performance.
@RailfanEthan that’s a weird way to spell Po-2
@RailfanEthan Brewster Buffalo sez "Hi"
Sunderland Mk V > literally any fighter plane