Shortround6
Major General
Well, they missed on the He 162. Downward angled wing tips were to compensate for ???
and which is it "get it right straight away" or "while they prepared both 12% and 20% slats in case 12% wasn't enough. It was though hydraulics might be needed so the aircraft was prepared so that these could be fitted."
Right straight away if you use belt, suspenders and double sided tape all at the same time?
Lockheed didn't do too bad with the P-80 by designing and building the XP-80 in 143 days ( it weighed over twice as much empty as the He 162 and might be considered a more complicated aircraft), It still took over a year from first flight to get 4-6 "trial" examples to Europe after it's first flight (and a slight enlargement of the aircraft) A number of German scientists, engine and airframe designers/engineers came to the US right after the war and some came later (one wound up head of the GE Jet engine division) and it still took until the early 50s to get axial compressor engines to "beat" centrifugal compressors. Of course the target was shifting a bit. A 1950-52 Axial compressor engine with high pressure ratio couldn't slide by with 25-50 hours of engine life like it could in 1945-46, not when the centrifugal and simple axial engines were achieving engine lives of hundreds of hours if not starting to exceed 1000 hours.
Lots of countries had bright engineers/scientists who had a lot of good ideas or new (and sometimes overlapping) theories. The inability of a particular country to bring these ideas to service use in short periods of time reflects much more on the state of the manufacturing art in a country than in the quality of those engineers/scientists. I am using "state of the manufacturing art" a bit loosely so as to cover material shortages, bomb damage/disruption, lack of low level engineers/draftsmen and a host of other things that can keep an idea/theory from going into production no matter how good or advanced the basic idea is/was. As an example the Russian probably used as many turbo-charged experimental aircraft or engines as the rest of the world put together (US excepted) but never succeeded in actually mass producing a turbo charged aircraft or engine (numbers in hundreds and not dozens) due to manufacturing problems. We know the idea works and the idea dates back to WW I but making turbo-chargers that would actually stand up to service use in the 1930s and 40s wasn't all that easy. Even the US just pulled it out at almost the last minute for a mass produced item.
It is the post war history of many of these weapons systems/engines/airframes that, while not developed with the urgency of war time, were developed without significant material shortages, bomb damage/disruption, large labor shortages and other problems and often with German designers/technicians/scientists giving advice/guidance that makes be doubt the ability of the Germans to actually turn most of those drawings into working hardware in 1-2 years. Just to be clear I would doubt the ability of ANY nation to turn the sketches/drawings/prototypes into serviceable weapons in 1-2 years.
