swampyankee
Chief Master Sergeant
- 3,994
- Jun 25, 2013
Thomson SMG. Heavy, expensive, low mv
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The German 88 gun, in my mind, is like what the Ju88 was for aircraft. Very versatile performing a lot of duties well, even if not great at any one of them. I'd like to hear why it may be overrated.
Well, there were over 80,000 t-34's produced in WWII. By contrast, only about 1200 Tiger I's were made. Russia was producing 3 times the number of T-34's in one month than Germany produced Tigers for the whole war.
To the earlier comment on T-34's being the most knocked out, that is true. I think over 44,000 were lost in action.
Sums up pretty much every German wonder-weapon.V2 was a fantastic technology.
But as a weapon of war it was meh.
V1 was more capable.
Considering it all the V2 turned out to be a huge waste of resources which would have been better spent on something else.
I think this highlights an interesting dichotomy in decision making facing military planners. That is spend resources on alot of older technology or fewer numbers of new. When viewed in relatively.short time frames it is easy to think it's better to go with more of the older technology but viewed in slightly longer time frames this kind of thinking will lead to fighting jets with biplanes so at some point you have to push ahead with new technology even if the cost per unit is many times higher.The A4 program was a transitional point in warfare.
Rest assured, if the British or Americans had the technology and hardware, they would not have hesitated to deploy them.
The V-1 program may have also been seen as a waste, but it did acheive some limited success - and let's compare how many V-1s were intercepted versus how many V-2s were intercepted, which would be none. There simply wasn't any countermeasures against a ballistic missile at the time and the V-2's targeting was hampered by the British releasing false reports, causing the Germans to incorrectly adjust their aim.
The U.S. had a similar program with the TDR drone system intended to be deployed against the Japanese, but delays and eventual successes against the Japanese later in the war reduced the need for the TDR, so it saw very limited deployment.
In warfare, you use every option at hand and oddly enough, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles happen to be in every major power's inventory...not too bad for a "wonder weapon", eh?
Each V-2 delivered a payload of about 2,200 pounds at a speed of roughly 1,700mph, creating close to battleship weapon sized craters and the Germans launched close to 2,000 of them at Britain (London most often).I was going to jump in here but some of my typing has been saved. No disagreement with the last post by GrauGeist. Without the V2 and its development, we may not have had the space race or the man on the moon. The V2 was extraordinarily valuable to where we are today in most "space based" things. Without Werner Von Braun, (and company), it may be arguable whether we have things like GPS or DirecTV or sputnik (satellite based technology needing rockets to get it there).
I was simply limiting my comment to its usefulness (overrated-ness?) as a weapon as used in WW II, not about future potential. If it was able to have even a small nuke (say little boy sized) and deliver to the UK, would that not have changed everything? But it didn't. It definitely was indefensible (once launched anyway) but smallish payload and inaccuracies simply gave it a cost to produce and deliver that was greater than the actual damage caused (psychological notwithstanding). Understanding the potential (hindsight is 20/20) I would have likely pursued it as well.
Are these new figures? like from the 1990s or later?
80,000 is about 24-25,000 more than some books say, but many books don't come close to agreeing on the number of T-34s and T-34/85s built during the war or the number of T-34/85s built after the war. The Number of SU-122s, SU-85s and SU-100s don't seem to come close to making up the difference.