The wunderwaffe was a last ditch propaganda attempt to boost morale of the Germans. Which kind of worked because many Germans still believed in the "final victory" with wunderwaffes along the way to save them, in spite of the Allies being at the gates of Berlin.
this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
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To be fair, I might stick it out if I thought wonder waffles were coming.
Given the now known precision of Russian high tech missiles, your chances should be good against WW2 high tech weapons
What the fuck was that in the last panel.
The atomic bomb. Very powerful.
What, you weren't reading it right to left like a manga? /s
Gun large enough to hit London. The barrel had to be so long that they built it into a hillside to keep it supported
Hmm. I'm guessing they had problems with getting enough propulsion going? The modern approach would involve some very synchronized stages, but WWII tech would make that difficult.
Otherwise, this would be a pretty cheap way of doing the Blitz.
Wouldn't the modern approach largely use synchronized magnets? I suppose you could synchronize explosive charges, but that seems way more complicated than a rail gun.
Quite possibly. Synchronised coils are still a kind of stage, though.
The downside of that approach is that you have to deliver a lot of electricity quickly. I'd still try it first, just because of the difficulties around protecting the barrel, and the much reduced moving parts count. I should also mention light gas guns, which mostly work like a normal non-staged gun but can get low-hypersonic muzzle velocities just by virtue of how quickly hydrogen or helium can expand.
It's a lot easier to produce large amounts of electricity than explosives IMO, especially in war-time when your supply lines are all messed up. As long as you have batteries/capacitors available for your weaponry, you can get creative on how you charge them.
Yeah, but we're not talking about lighting or space heating here. You need all that energy at once in a split second. Vacuum flywheels or superconducting loops are the usual go-tos for powering coilguns IIRC. The power electronics and switches (as opposed to the control electronics) also need to be able to handle significant current while still being fast.
If it was that easy, normal stationary guns would be electrical, rather than using a primary and secondary explosive charge in precision-machined disposable casings.
Right, it's not easy, but it's generally a one-time cost, especially if it's going to be in a well-defended area (e.g. the electrical bits would largely be underground to protect from bombs and help w/ heat control). So once you build the infra, you just need to be able to recharge it, and it's pretty easy to create electricity even if your supply lines are cut off (burn whatever you have).
It certainly wouldn't be practical for a mobile battery, but for something like this that just sits on a hillside, I think it would be quite practical. So not something the US would be interested in, but it would make a ton of sense for something like Nazi Germany where there are a ton of enemies within shooting distance.
And enemies all exposed together in a fixed place, but somehow not reachable by normal weapons of mass destruction. That's the real reason hillgun is noncredible at this point, even if you could figure out a way to protect the muzzle end well enough.
I said in another thread here that I'd go for coilgun first, so I don't disagree. More for the resistance to wear or mechanical failure than because explosives are hard to come by, though.
I'm thinking of something like the Ukraine War, where neither side has air superiority, and both have capable air defenses. The primary long range attack option is rocket attacks, but rockets are expensive. A railgun just needs electricity, replacement rails, and something conductive to launch. As a fixed weapon, they should be pretty effective, especially if they can adjust their aim a few degrees.
Germany had air superiority vs UK, so they could use conventional bombers. But today, they'd need to contend with the US, so I don't think that strategy would work today. Launching heavy objects at incredible speed almost always works though.
Coilguns are awesome though. I think they'd make awesome anti-tank guns, but they probably wouldn't scale well enough for long range bombardment.
I mean, you can make most of the gun underground, but the muzzle always has to stick out. If you don't have air superiority I'd think that would make it pretty vulnerable.
A giant, underground gun that that can also aim a few degrees is straight up an experimental concept. I guess you could put it all on a giant turn-table?
I'm thinking of a situation where neither side has air superiority, and both have solid air defenses. In that case, I don't think the gun needs to be underground, just the expensive electrical bits, so the barrel can be exposed. The electrical bits could be anywhere in the area, as long as they connect to the rails, which should be pretty cheap.
I'm sure there area million reasons it wouldn't work, but I think it checks out on paper.
They were doing exactly that. The pairs of pipes coming out the sides of the barrel are more charges, being timed to go right after the projectile goes through.
Didn't work well also barrel life of like 5 shots and you can't aim it or move it. Dumb, like everything they did.
Yeah. Now it'd be easy to programmably trigger each charge on the order of microseconds or less, and we can make some pretty fast-shutting valves. Barrel wear is harder and would probably involve simulational fluid dynamics. More likely we'd just build a coilgun, which removes that issue very nicely, and uses similar control electronics.
Of course, if you want to destroy a city there's also nukes now, and anything else tends to either move or be very well protected. People have talked about this for space travel, but the trade-off between G-forces and length hurts at least as much as the rocket equation (despite being "only" quadratic instead of exponential).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Babylon
if you're interested, a more modern take on the concept was attempted using conventional explosives.
Ah yes, the Canadian guy working with Saddam to start a novel space program (that totally for sure wouldn't be repurposed as a weapon). Too bad he was assassinated, that would have been really interesting and probably wouldn't have been a major military risk to anyone.
Of course the pic of the long-range fighter is a P-51, which always gets all the credit for that shit. But the P-47N was built to escort B-29s all the way from the Marshall Islands to Japan and back, and had a range in the neighborhood of 3000 miles - simply astonishing when you consider how short-legged fighters were at the beginning of the war (Battle of Britain Bf109s could barely make 400 miles).
This is missing a picture of an American shipyard and an ice cream barge. The Japanese really didn't have a hope of winning. We were adding multiple aircraft carriers per year to the fleet, and more each year than the last. So they'd sink one and it would be replaced by 3 more.
an ice cream barge
For those not familiar, the WW2 US Pacific fleet included, no joke, a barge originally built to deliver and mix massive amounts of concrete that was refitted with food grade surfaces and a huge cooling system to supply ice cream throughout the fleet. I mean, it was navy "ice cream" from powder, but it was still a luxury that boosted morale wherever it went. I can only imagine how much it would have hurt Japanese morale if they had found out the US had so much resources to spare that they could waste them on industrial quantities of frozen treats.
Also remember that this was during Prohibition when ice cream was the stand in for booze for most Americans.
Basically the Navy was rowing around a battalion-sized keg party across the Atlantic
Also, one of my favorite American history facts, after a chain of several events this is also why we still have about a billion pounds of cheese squirreled away in caves under most of the Midwest. Not kidding. The ice cream boom caused problems for the milk industry after Prohibition was repealed and one two skip a few, we've got 19.5 fucktons of government subsidized cheese and nowhere to put it. This is a true story. Once society inevitably collapses in the West I'm headed toward the cheese caves.
WW2 started several years after America ended the Prohibition, and the ice cream barge was commissioned in its later years as the war in the Pacific dragged on. Still, I don't think the navy was providing alcohol rations, so I imagine it was quite the party atmosphere when the ice cream barge showed up.
Oof, guess my timing was a little off, fair enough. But by this point these were soldiers who grew up with ice cream being the norm.
I knew NCD would get it.
people will be like "but project paperclip!" and it's like nah, that was basically just a way to pay them off so they didn't work for the Soviets, we didn't actually need the tech. Von Braun was a fucking office manager.
To be fair I believe the Wehrmacht really wanted to move to issuing more small arms like the G43 and the STG/MP44 but Hitler was shortsighted and spiked the STG44 project personally.
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