Daydream Notes

Part 1 can be found here. Program :start:                              The prototype He 219 as drafted by Heinkel was very similar to the plane that would eventually fly. It had a narrow fuselage, twin engines now in the conventional places, and a twin tail. While tail turrets will still mulled over as an option, most of the firepower was to be directed forward, in the wings and in a ventral tray beneath the fuselage. While the cockpit was now arranged in tandem, there was some disagreement as to if there should be two or three crew, with the third manning the rear firing guns, much like the night fighter Ju 88. (A prototype flew, which test pilots commented had even better handling than the plain Uhu, but nothing came of it.) The fuselage was so narrow, in fact, this created a slight problem with the tricycle landing gear. The whe...

Here's that Analysis of Nazi Bureaucracy You Wanted     Aircraft Procurement in the Third Reich was profoundly fucked up. To give you an idea as to how badly procurement failed, know that only in daytime fighters (the Bf 109 and the Fw 190) did the Reich manage to maintain parity with their opponents during the Second World War. Nearly every other airplane fielded by the Nazi state during was either obsolete or slowly became obsolete while waiting for a replacement. The Reich had three critical wartime procurement projects – the Me 210, the He 177, and the 'bomber b' project (a project to make a next generation medium bomber to replace the He 111, Do 217, and Ju 88) – fail abjectly, with the products of these programs being significantly delayed and often unusable. In 1941, 20% of Reich aircraft production was lost because of scheduling for new types to replace older ones, types that did not appear. These procurement failures were a key factor in the Luftwaffe's defea...