Udet said:
Lunatic: with all due respect, you appear to have issues with the Ta 152 and, globally speaking, with everything that is German. On what bloody grounds do you affirm the Germans could have not developed more powerful engines?
DerAdlerIstGelandet said:
Again the Germans were very capable of coming up with new designs and machine tools. Please dont misunderstand me you say that the Germans were not capable of making machine tools, they too could have they were not stupid people. But I do agree that they were going to the Jets and it would not have been decided by the P-51H and the Ta-152.
Ahh... but they didn't.
If you study the history of machine tool development you will find there was a diversion between those of Europe and those of America dating back to the end of the 18th century. After the Revolution, Britain maintained an embargo against the former Colonies, and this especially included machine tools.
Europe's machine tools dated back to the 14th century or even earlier, and had progressed in a steady evolution along the lines of what were known as "shaper" tools. Basically these were huge grinders involving very large moving parts, often a large spinning wheel or a table moving back and forth under water, and later steam, power. These tools were capable of creating very intricate designs, but relied heavily on the skill of the operator. The very nature of the European crafts guilds was such that they had a vested interest in this kind of labor/skill intensive machining, and this remained the way things were done right through WWI.
In America however, they had to improvise. There were very very few European machine tools in America, and even fewer skilled craftsmen able to really work them. As a result, new types machines were developed, especially in the 19th century, first to accomodate the railway boom and then the Civil War. The milling machine was invented in the USA, a much smaller tool than European shaping tools, and able to do complex machining using a series of jigs and patterns greatly reducing the skill required of the operators. This progressed into the automated industrial tools used by Ford and other American factories. Europe did not have this kind of industrial process, it was much more craftsmen than machine tool oriented. As a result, European craftsmenship of complex items such as automobiles was generally considerably better than most American craftsmenship of such items, but American quality of mass produced items was better than that of Europe. European items such as guns generally didn't enjoy the degree of parts interchangability that American guns did - ie: each gun had to be individually fitted, you could not take a part from another "identical" gun and exchange it without substantial work to fit it to the rest of the unit.
In the early 20th century, America enjoyed an instrial boom that Europe did not really share. Heavy industry made huge gains, especially the rail and ship-building industries. American automated machine tools of mass production, already ahead of those of Europe, advanced considerably during this time.
So when WWII came along, the Germans lacked the machine tool technology available in the USA (and by export to Britain). They were several generations behind in milling machines, and lacked a sophisticated automated large scale milling machine. They had no automated centerless grinders. They had no gang-of-saws machines. All these and many other machining tasks were undertaken by crews of skilled craftsmen.
But craftsmen simply cannot do some of the things that these tools could do. For instance, the Napier Sabre engine only became mass produceable when three Thompson automated centerless grinders capable of making oblong parts to better than 1/10,000th of an inch accuracy were provided by the USA (much to Pratt&Whitney's chigrin since they had funded their development, and the diversion of the first three grinders delayed the R-2800(c) by several months). As we know, Germany was never able to mass produce turbines of sufficient balance and quality to supply their jet engine program (which required 10,000 rpm turbines) or to make a workable turbo-supercharger at all (this required 25,000 rpm turbines). They were never able to make forged cylinder heads with 5" deep fins cut at 1/8th inch spacings as found on the R-2800(c) engines, work that is virtually impossible to accomplish in any quantity of production with power files, no matter how skilled the craftsmen, but which could be done on the production line in seconds by the new "gang-of-saws" machine tools.
The development of these kinds of tools was an evolutionary process and required decades to accomplish. Germany was not going to develop them over night to make a better engine for the Ta152. This is why the American (and British) aircraft industry was still focusing on increasing the basic power output of their engines, Germany had turned to tricks like MW50 and GM1 to achieve more power. The problem with that is that MW50 was quickly copied by the Allies, but the German's could not so easily steal the Allied innovations.
=S=
Lunatic
