Vergeltungswaffe 3

[Zecristo]

"... Nearer to actual realisation was his V3 revenge weapon,which was horrific in paper, but which simply failed to work in practice. A fifty-barrelled long-range gun installation was buried in a fortified emplacement near the village of Mimoyecques in the Pas de Calais. Each of the smooth-bored barrels was about four hundred feet long, and had successive small explosive charges in side-tubes at frequent intervals along the barrel. These charges were fired in rapid succession as a shell of approximately six inches diameter with fins at the back end passed up the barrel. The idea was that the fins would stabilise the shell, and that the range would be sufficient for the device to hit London continuosly at a rate of one shell every few minutes. In the event, the shells from the weapon simply toppled in the air, and turned end over end, thereby losing speed and range. London, when it heard about that particular failure, was suitably grateful."

in World War II by Ivor Matanle chapter 39 page 308

[ironman]

i saw a docemontairy about Von Braun and hes rockets, was he also involved in this supergun ?

sounds very much like the supergun saddam hussein wanted to make to fire shells half way arround the world..

[DarkClown]

that thing was huge and very dangerous. it would have destroyed whole london in a few hours/days

[ironman]

is there any picture of it ??
i would very much like to see this super canon..

[DarkClown]

admin said:

is there any picture of it ??
i would very much like to see this super canon..

this is what i found:



and ammo for that thing:

[fr3sh]

from what I have seen and read the gun was unusable...
the costs of firing would be far too gr8 and besides timing everything, in those times, could have proved to be a challange too big...
and using it... imagine what would be the trouble aiming that thing
it would be just a 'fixed aim' barrel
and again the problem with timing those successive explosions...
...useless...

yet in theory all 'wunderwaffe'-s were devastating
yet i think that the v2 rocket would be a sufficent weapon... just some more time... and the konigtiger... but again too late, too few...
and with the king tiger we have another problem... the gr8 dilema... armour, maneuverability, firepower or range...
so you can jump to the conclusion that there was, there is nad there will never be a wonder weapon... and even if smth like that shall be designed, somebody will make a weapon to counter that weapon so it won't be a wonder weapon no more...

[Zecristo]

fr3sh said:

from what I have seen and read the gun was unusable...
the costs of firing would be far too gr8 and besides timing everything, in those times, could have proved to be a challange too big...
and using it... imagine what would be the trouble aiming that thing
it would be just a 'fixed aim' barrel
and again the problem with timing those successive explosions...
...useless...

yet in theory all 'wunderwaffe'-s were devastating
yet i think that the v2 rocket would be a sufficent weapon... just some more time... and the konigtiger... but again too late, too few...
and with the king tiger we have another problem... the gr8 dilema... armour, maneuverability, firepower or range...
so you can jump to the conclusion that there was, there is nad there will never be a wonder weapon... and even if smth like that shall be designed, somebody will make a weapon to counter that weapon so it won't be a wonder weapon no more...

The "super gun" was designed to destroy London and London is a quite stationary target. Even so I agree the aiming being a major problem. Any small miscalculation would render the whole installation useless and probably it would be cheaper to build a new one than correcting a badly aimed one. And there remains the question of if destroying London at that particular timing would have significantly altered the outcome of the war...
Anyway, as far as this particular book tells us the project failed because of projectile stabilisation problems, curiously also one of the major if not the biggest problem with the developing of the V2 rocket (all the metal fins/rudders melted until they started using graphite).
Ultimately, how much accuracy you can put into aiming a gun can be rendered completely useless by an unreliable projectile.

Yes, it will be long debated if some more and earlier V2 rockets, heavy tanks like the Konigtiger and the 100 ton behemoth prototype Maus or tank destroyers like the Jagdtiger, and the Me262 jet fighter and his successors would have been sufficient to tilt the scales in another direction.
As it was, the weight of the tanks was more often a disadvantage if terrain allowed the vast quantities of Allied and Soviet armour to outflank or outmanouver the largely outnumbered sluggish defending German tanks and tank destroyers and the jet fighters and V2 rockets were never enough in the skies to make any significant difference as to the outcome of war.
Yet more important, at that stage Germany was desperately short on the raw materials of "modern war": fuel for aircraft was almost non-existent and fuel for land vehicles was not far ahead from that. Metals, coal and rubber stocks were low. And even moving what little was left from stockpiles to processing plants under a sky dominated by enemy air power was an almost impossible task.
Manpower was also stretched to the limit.
So at the last stages of war many of the few state of the art German jet fighters, tanks and tank destroyers produced were never used by sheer lack of fuel to run them and finding suitably trained crews for those weapons was very difficult.
So I would say that Nazi Germany lost WWII earlier in 1941 when it engaged a two front war (not counting the North Africa/Mediterranean and/or the Atlantic fronts) led by an “idealist” who commited a series of strategic blunders that prevented German Arms to capitalise on their successes in Poland, France, the Balkans and initial success in the Soviet Union.
There is one other project that could have granted Nazi Germany the means to win the war.
The atom bomb project.
But some norwegians had other thoughts and sunk almost all of the heavy water there was available...

[ironman]

zecristo said:

fr3sh said:

The atom bomb project.
But some norwegians had other thoughts and sunk almost all of the heavy water there was available...

Yeah but there isnt where it ends, becos the Norwegians sank the ferry that had the german heavy water for the production of a atom bomb, they put all there raw plutonium and a whole me262 into a submarine and it was under way to japan becos japan was working on a atom bomb too, but half way on there trip germany surrenderd and the captain of the u-boat surrenderd too and so the plutonium came in american hands, and they used it to make the 2 atom bombs that they later dropped on japan (boy life has a way of being ironic hasnt it )

[flying]

Hmm, that's curious, I read somewhere not long ago (I need to look it up) that even Speer admited that the stockpiles of raw materials, tucked safely away in underground depots adjoining a multitude of underground factories (was it in the mountainous Thuringia region?) would have been more than enough to continue the war without impediments for at least another couple of years.

And since these factories were mainly assembly lines requireing little if any specialized manpower, as long as there was access to slave labour, the production would go on.

Underground facilities were much bigger and widespread in WWII Germany than we would expect by watching only Allies "propaganda" movies by Hollywood & Co, including undergound and camouflaged railways and even an underground airstrip out of a mountain side, from where freshly-built airplanes would be flown right out of the factory to their military recipients.

Fuel, yes, that would be the most important "fuse" in the German war "fuse-box", especially after failing to secure the Ploesti oil fields. I don't know if enough fuel was also stocked underground in proportion to the raw-atters, but that would be interesting to investigate.

But, at the end of the day, what constantly crippled and eventually killed beyond all hope the German war effort was the unbelievable disorganization of the "Purchases & Acquisitions Department" when handling weaponry manufacturers/suppliers.

[ironman]

yeah are right iv seen a documantary about albert speer and he designed (and it was buildt) a whole tunnel under berlin it was a 2 car freeway under the city so they could move goods without having to worry about air raids..
it had plenty of shelters and supplies and such,,

[Zecristo]

flying said:

But, at the end of the day, what constantly crippled and eventually killed beyond all hope the German war effort was the unbelievable disorganization of the "Purchases & Acquisitions Department" when handling weaponry manufacturers/suppliers.

More than one analyst has stated the obvious fact that german arms used too much variants of too much models of too much different and expensive vehicles and equipment, often demanding high degrees of complex and timely maintenance work.
This would have been, at least partly, a consequence of Hitler's tendency to hold simultaneously various people responsible for the same issues creating multiplications of chains of command, and of production strategies, often leading to several production branches entering in contesting, conflicting or simply contradictory paths in trying to solve the same problem.
Topping that, the creature had too the tendency to base decisions on sudden whims or temporary dispositions often cancelling what was already being done, by his own orders sometimes, because "it would not be needed" or agreeing to the starting of new often unuseful projects.
Of course, applying the Füehrer principle downwards, things got ever more confused by the succession of "little Hitlers" interferences in the decisions and often the "little man" did anything his imediate superior told him to as long he was told "by the Füehrer's will".