If the Rare Bear became a ww2 fighter.

GregP said:

I suppose it depends on whose definition of "wonder deapon" we are using. I have my own and everyone else doubtless has theirs. I think o the proverbial wonder weapon as a "game changer," and tehre most certaily WERE a few of those.

Click to expand...

A "wonder weapon" would certainly be a "game changer"...but if we put WW2 into your context, every other day saw a "wonder weapon" when they issued the next mark of the Spitfire, or upgunned a B-25 or issued semi-automatic carbines instead of bolt-action rifles.

There is a considerable difference between a person's opinion and actual circumstances.

On the battle field, the introduction of the bow arrow was a "wonder weapon" because it all of a sudden allowed an army the ability to stand off and engage the enemy, however, as fearsome as it was, the longbow was only a technological leap foreward in the bow arrow's evolution. Just because the longbow gave the archers a tremendous advantage over the standard archers does not make it a "wonder weapon", it makes it a new threat to be countered. And the countermeasure for the longbow was...black powder, which was a "wonder weapon".

We all have our own opinions and today's "wonder weapon" is tomorrow's old technology.

Same thing happens today. The ICBM was only a "wonder weapon" until more than one country had them. Then they became something else ...

I don't believe that the Bf 109, Spitfire or T-34 were really game changers. Not in the sense that they really caused a break in the development of their type of weapon or a major change in tactics.

There weren't enough type XXI subs in action (if the war cruises of the German type XXI subs can even be called action) to change the "game" during WW II but they (or their level of performance) were certainly a "game changer" as they rendered not only hundreds of anti-sub vessels (some fairly new) obsolete but required new or different tactics and weapons to counter. Fortunately the west and Russia never came to direct blows in the late 40s or 50s but the threat of Soviet submarines of similar performance to the type XXI had NATO naval commanders going near crazy for quite a while. Subs that can go as fast or faster underwater than the AS ships that are supposed to 'catch' them certainly changed the game. Please remember that subs under water didn't have to slow down for sea conditions. Granted they could not do it for long but how long was needed to avoid a depth charge attack or even a hedgehog attack or to break contact with the sonar of the day? Much longer under water endurance and even the ability to 'cruise' at double the speed while snorkeling compared to earlier subs significantly altered the detection problem.

One can say that most all weapons are evolutionary but when you can take a line of weapons and break it into pre-XXX models and post-XXX models you can make a case for a game changing model. The Bf 109 and Spitfire didn't do that, many other countries were working on similar aircraft at the same time. There is no pre-109/Spit and post-109/Spit break in the development of fighter planes. A case might be made for the T-34 but it is on thin ice.

I'm sorry, I don't recall where I stated an opinion. I simply laid down a few facts.

Just because you paint a sharkmouth on a Bf110, doesn't make it a wonder weapon because it's different or unusual.

To qualify as a "wonder weapon", it needs to be a technology that has not been employed before. At least this is the impression I have gathered over the years, reading about the subject.

But don't worry, Greg...when I do come up with an opinion on this subject, you'll be the first to know.

GrauGeist said:

A "wonder weapon" would certainly be a "game changer"...but if we put WW2 into your context, every other day saw a "wonder weapon" when they issued the next mark of the Spitfire, or upgunned a B-25 or issued semi-automatic carbines instead of bolt-action rifles.

There is a considerable difference between a person's opinion and actual circumstances.

On the battle field, the introduction of the bow arrow was a "wonder weapon" because it all of a sudden allowed an army the ability to stand off and engage the enemy, however, as fearsome as it was, the longbow was only a technological leap foreward in the bow arrow's evolution. Just because the longbow gave the archers a tremendous advantage over the standard archers does not make it a "wonder weapon", it makes it a new threat to be countered. And the countermeasure for the longbow was...black powder, which was a "wonder weapon".

Click to expand...

Actually the Long Bow was a 'game changer' even if not quite a "wonder weapon" in that it gave a 'peasant' army the chance to stand up in battle to 'traditional' forces ( the warrior class/nobility). It certainly did not guarantee success but it shifted the power (at least somewhat) away from the armored men at arms. It was replaced by black powder muskets because it took much less time to train a man to use a musket (a few weeks?) than to use a long bow ( a few, or not so few, years).

If it's new technology that hasn't been employed before, then the Me 262 qualifies, as do the XXI and XIII U-Boats. The Panzer was new technology. The B-29 was by virtue of being so much faster while carrying a LOT of load. The V-1 and V-2 qualify, too.

But this isn't something I want to drag on about. I can accept a definition and Graugeist's definition is OK. And he is right, a sharkmouth doesn't change a Bf 110 by much except to make it more easily seen in daylight.

Happy Holidays, Graugeist.

Shortround6 said:

I don't believe that the Bf 109, Spitfire or T-34 were really game changers. Not in the sense that they really caused a break in the development of their type of weapon or a major change in tactics.

There weren't enough type XXI subs in action (if the war cruises of the German type XXI subs can even be called action) to change the "game" during WW II but they (or their level of performance) were certainly a "game changer" as they rendered not only hundreds of anti-sub vessels (some fairly new) obsolete but required new or different tactics and weapons to counter. Fortunately the west and Russia never came to direct blows in the late 40s or 50s but the threat of Soviet submarines of similar performance to the type XXI had NATO naval commanders going near crazy for quite a while. Subs that can go as fast or faster underwater than the AS ships that are supposed to 'catch' them certainly changed the game. Please remember that subs under water didn't have to slow down for sea conditions. Granted they could not do it for long but how long was needed to avoid a depth charge attack or even a hedgehog attack or to break contact with the sonar of the day? Much longer under water endurance and even the ability to 'cruise' at double the speed while snorkeling compared to earlier subs significantly altered the detection problem.

One can say that most all weapons are evolutionary but when you can take a line of weapons and break it into pre-XXX models and post-XXX models you can make a case for a game changing model. The Bf 109 and Spitfire didn't do that, many other countries were working on similar aircraft at the same time. There is no pre-109/Spit and post-109/Spit break in the development of fighter planes. A case might be made for the T-34 but it is on thin ice.

Click to expand...

Sure they where when the first came out, the other side had to react to "best it". That would be a definition of a game changer.

Point being, nothing was really a "wonder weapon" minus the A-Bomb.

GregP said:

If it's new technology that hasn't been employed before, then the Me 262 qualifies, as do the XXI and XIII U-Boats. The Panzer was new technology. The B-29 was by virtue of being so much faster while carrying a LOT of load. The V-1 and V-2 qualify, too.

But this isn't something I want to drag on about. I can accept a definition and Graugeist's definition is OK. And he is right, a sharkmouth doesn't change a Bf 110 by much except to make it more easily seen in daylight.

Happy Holidays, Graugeist.

Click to expand...

Then why bring it up, let alone decide what is valid or not?

DerAdlerIstGelandet said:

Point being, nothing was really a "wonder weapon" minus the A-Bomb.

Click to expand...

There were honestly several innovations that appeared in WWII that were "wonder weapons", the A-Bomb being one, of course.

Another would have been the Aggregat rocket series. This was not a rocket in the sense of the Katyusha or Nebelwerfer on the battlefield. Instead, this was the grandfather of the ICBM and was the first to reach space (shortly after WWII, during testing) and was the herald of a whole new type of warfare. As it happens, the Aggregat's descendants would one day carry the descendants of the A-bomb as a payload...

Hey Adler, I didn't bring it up. The thread wound around to it without my intervention at all.

I added my thoughts. Isn't that what we are supposed to do in here?

If there is something specific you didn't like about my reply, what was it? Seemed very friendly to me. If it seems otherwise to anyone, that wasn't my intent. I was just participating in the discussion. Really.



Agreed, Adler. Once someone disagreed with what is and isn't a wonder weapon, it did get kind of dumb. I shan't wonder any longer ...

As it stands, the Ta 152 was the final development of the Fw 190 due to the war ending. The potential of this aircraft had not been reached, but it was by no means revolutionary. I still maintain that the luftwaffe would have done better by concentrating on this aircraft ( and the Me 262) than wasting resources on the He 162 jet which was operationally useless. On the flip side, fuel for piston engines was even more rare than J2 jet fuel. Performance wise, the Ta 152 could hold its own against anything the allies could field, and given equal piloting skill, given the Sea fury or Rarebear a run for their money. All hypothetical of course......

The He 162 and Ta 152 were equally 'operationally useless'; that not being the 'guilt' of those A/C.

Could you please elaborate a bit on the bolded part:

As it stands, the Ta 152 was the final development of the Fw 190 due to the war ending. The potential of this aircraft had not been reached, but it was by no means revolutionary.

Click to expand...

Shortround6 said:

Actually the Long Bow was a 'game changer' even if not quite a "wonder weapon" in that it gave a 'peasant' army the chance to stand up in battle to 'traditional' forces ( the warrior class/nobility). It certainly did not guarantee success but it shifted the power (at least somewhat) away from the armored men at arms. It was replaced by black powder muskets because it took much less time to train a man to use a musket (a few weeks?) than to use a long bow ( a few, or not so few, years).

Click to expand...

If we are talking about the English/Welsh armies of the 100 Years War just to be picky they werent a peasant army but were the sons of Land Owning farmers Artisan craftsmen and the Literate classes like Scribes, Lawyers and Businessmen. What today would be called the aspirational Middle class. Peasants had neither the time nor the money to go and spend time at the shooting butts to become a proficent Bowman they were too busy working. The Bowmen were volunteers mostly young in there late teens early twenties and went to war not particulary for any dynastic nationalistic reasons but for the pay and the chance of plunder.

Anyway your right the Welsh Longbow was a game changer but was no more than an evolution of a hunting bow. A Spitfire compared to a Sopwith Camel.

The longbow was no more a revolutionary weapon than the cross bow. It was not a wonder weapon in any sense.
Bows had been around for a very long time and whilst an English longbow was a very powerful bow it wasn't an order of magnitude more powerful than other contemporary weapons (unlike an atomic bomb and a conventional bomb).
What changed the game was the tactics the English used to maximise the potential of the weapon. It's most important advantage was a very high rate of shooting (you don't fire a bow), any archer worth his salt could launch six arrows a minute, far more than a cross bowman. Deploy several thousand archers and that weight of arrows could be decisive.

English bowmen were not trained they were made. Every able bodied male was obliged by law to practice archery at the butts on holy days and other sports were banned. The bows from the Mary Rose mostly had draw weights in the 100-130lb range and a draw length of 30". The arrows were all well made, mostly of Poplar but also of Birch and Alder, with a few more exotic (Willow, Hornbeam, Elder, Hawthorne, Walnut and Ash all being represented). Most were bob tailed but others were parallel, barrelled and even breasted. They were almost all fletched with goose feathers. This is all ancient technology, even at the time.

These weapons were not made for hunting or sport, they were made for war. Earlier Henry V had 3,000,000 arrows made for his expedition to France. That's more than an arrow for every man woman and child in England at the time, and making them was a skilled trade, there was a limited number of Fletchers and Bowyers, but many bows already existed. English blacksmiths would have been very busy making the arrowheads for all these arrows, particularly the mail piercing (or parting) bodkins. This was required to equip an army whose composition included more than 70% archers. The slaughter of the French nobility at Agincourt, in which the longbow was one of the most important factors, is well known.

Cheers

Steve

fastmongrel said:

If we are talking about the English/Welsh armies of the 100 Years War just to be picky they werent a peasant army but were the sons of Land Owning farmers Artisan craftsmen and the Literate classes like Scribes, Lawyers and Businessmen. What today would be called the aspirational Middle class. Peasants had neither the time nor the money to go and spend time at the shooting butts to become a proficent Bowman they were too busy working. The Bowmen were volunteers mostly young in there late teens early twenties and went to war not particulary for any dynastic nationalistic reasons but for the pay and the chance of plunder.

Anyway your right the Welsh Longbow was a game changer but was no more than an evolution of a hunting bow. A Spitfire compared to a Sopwith Camel.

Click to expand...

The advantage of a longbow was its range and rate of fire, the disadvantage was its inaccuracy and most of all the time taken to train. Longbow men took years to get the strength needed, archeologists can tell a longbowman because their skeletons are deformed.

my game changer would be proximity fused weapons against the V1 and also infantry who moved away from tanks rather than staying close for protection.

Obviously the A Bomb wins though

pbehn said:

The advantage of a longbow was its range and rate of fire, the disadvantage was its inaccuracy and most of all the time taken to train. Longbow men took years to get the strength needed, archeologists can tell a longbowman because their skeletons are deformed.

Click to expand...

Some of the bowmen's skeletons found on the Mary Rose did show evidence of considerable strength, not really deformation. This was in the latter days of archery and these skeletons belonged to the men of the King's (Henry VIII) personal body guard. They were professional archers, not the men of the yeomanry militias (most definitely NOT peasants) of earlier times.

Many regular people today use bows of considerable draw weight, comparable to that of a medieval longbow. It requires strength and practice, particularly to sustain a rapid rate of shooting as required in a battle. This is why it was a legal requirement to practice for the men who might be required to fight for the King on behalf of their overlord. If you accidently killed someone whilst practicing you wouldn't be charged with the offence, which must have opened up a legal loop hole for murder. This law superseded Common Law, it was and still is contrary to Common Law to murder someone
They didn't require any extraordinary or superhuman ability. This is a bit of a myth, a bit like the supposed immobility of men at arms, even when you consider that their armour was specifically designed to allow them the movement to fight!

There are many reasons floated for the increasing use of archers in English armies, it started to become evident in the late 14th and early 15th centuries. The overriding reason will be familiar to all of us in this cash strapped time for defence budgets. Archers were cheap, very cheap, compared to men at arms.

Cheers

Steve

There is no WWII fighter that could give a Rare Bear a run for the money, certainly not a Ta 152 with the high-aspect, high-altitude wings. All the front-running Reno racers are 100+ mph faster than the fastest WWII fighters. Any stock WWII fighter participating at Reno would be lapped in 2 - 3 laps out of 8. The stock guys run in the Bronze class and are 100+ mph slower than the gold class is.

On the flip side, the racers would never make much of a fighter. They have no fuel to speak of and are not armed. If you added fuel and armament, they would slow down marginaly in a straight line, but all have been so tweaked as to preclude being useful to the military, and it was all in the pure interests of speed alone at the expense of all other functions. I doubt the surface finish required to reach Reno speeds could be maintained out in the open in any case. The engines are boosted to the point of being not reliable enough for a 1-hour mission, much less several / many of them, and unless the Ta 152 could be tweaked up to around 3,800 HP and given a race finish and race modifocations, it would be a very poor second to any of the Gold class racers. The P-47N would fare no better.

Nobody can approach Reno speeds without a dedicated effort of several years to do exactly that.

To put Reno speeds into perspective, Reno is at about 5,000 feet MSL. Steven Hinton Jr. flew one lap at 512 mph flying about 100 feet above ground level while flying a pear-shaped course that measured 8.1 miles long. In places he was pulling 4 - 5 g's and rarely was in momentary level flight. I watched a video of him flying the entire race and he gained or lost less than 30 feet the entire race!

So we have an exceptional pilot flying what is one of the two fastest piston aircraft the world has ever seen. No stock or even "hopped up" military fighters will ever come even close at the altitudes being flown around the course being flown. We have no idea what the critical altitude of a Reno engine is since none of them even FLY unless it is race time at Reno, and they don't go anywhere except around the course. Only the race teams themselves even know the drag coefficient of the racers.

Rare Bear doesn't even have a multi-use landing gear retraction and extension system. When it takes off the gear will come up once and go down once ... and then he is out of pressurized Nitrogen until the tank is re-filled!

If ever there was an "apples to oranges" comparison, this is one of them

what about a comparison of production Bearcat to Ta152?

I think a production Bearcat would eat a Ta 152 alive under about 18,000 feet, particularly if the external fuel tansk were gone. Above 22,000 feet the Ta 152 would be almost a sure winner, with the outcome in some doubt in between. The Bearcat would out-accelerate, out-climb (almost double), probably roll a small bit slower (not much) and, at least the Bearcat with the four 20 mm cannons, would have about an even shot when it comes to armament.

The Bearcat was never designed for high-altitude combat and would be at a disadvantage way up there. Down low, the tables are completely turned.

One major advantage for the Bearcat is visibility. I have sat in the Fw 190D at the Champlin Fighter Museum back in the 1980's and the cockpit is very small with almost no room to turn your head sideways ... and rearward visibilty was almost nil. So the view out the windscreen would be about the same, but the Bearcat would have visibility all over the Ta 152 from 90° sideways around to the rear.

At altitude the Ta 152 is very fast (and rolls better, probably noticeably so) , but the Beracat is probably as fast or faster at low altitudes where it was designed to operate, especially the F8F-2, and can roll with the Ta 152 down low where the Ta's long wings are a disadvantage. The Bearcat also has very benign stall characteristics, as do most US Navy fighters by design. The Fw 190 series is known for having almost no stall warning. That mkes it hard to reef into a hard turn near the angle of attack limit, comparatively. The Bearcat will always give a good stall warning before departing.

I really like the "one lever" power setup in the Fw (assuming the Ta 152 had it, too) for dogfighting, but the standard throttle, mixture, and rpm are much better for cruising in formation, even if loose formation.

There were a lot more Bearcats delivered and they had spare parts available once deployed, so serviceability is a check for the Bearcat.

Much of my seeming dismissal of the Ta 152 comes from it's relative absence from German war plans due to almost none being available for regular deployment in meaningful numbers. Had the Ta 152 been deployed in some numbers, it would have proven a major pain in the Allied fighter battle, at least until our jets got into the fray. It was a very good one, but almost nonexistent in real life.

A very similar fate was dealt to another favorite of mine, the Italian Reggiane Re.2005 Sagittario. It was superb, too, but they only made 48 as opposed to 43 Ta 152's delivered. Ergo almost no impact to the real war. But both are good-looking, well-designed late-war piston fighters that could have been members of the "great fighter club" if deployed earlier in some numbers.

I really like the Ta 152 and the Re.2005 ... they just weren't very effective in the real-life main event, through no real fault of their own, and are very deserving of high praise for combat potential that was never realized.