"Charles Gray" wrote in message
...
had actually put a U.S. style R&D system in place during WWII, and
instead of coming up with (however pretty they look on paper) dozens
of designs that never made it beyond wind tunnal designs and focused
on say two or three fighter designs.
For example, if they'd pushed through the first jet fighter design
in 1940 (I forget what it was called), and focused on incremental
improvmeents instead of always running to the next design.

Would this have had a major impact on WWII, or just drawn it out by
a few months?

There are a number of issues here

1) They couldnt just push on with the initial design
it was no more a workable fighter than the original
Gloster prototype

2) The bottleneck for German (and to an extent allied)
jet fighter production was developing an engine that
could be mass produced and have an accceptable
service life. This problem was exacerbated by the
shortage of high temperature alloying elements such
as chrome, nickel and tungsten. The Germans never really
solved this problem. The Jumo engines had a rated life
of 25 hours, which was rarely achieved, at a time when
Rolls Royce jet engines had exceeded 2000 hours

3) Germany never had a shortage of airframes and their
fighters were as good as contemporary western designs and
better than most soviet ones. They did however lack
pilots and fuel. As a result thousands of aircraft were
captured on the goround by the end of the war.

The wind tunnel designs and studies didnt really tie up
much in the way of resources. The really wasteful
project was the V-2/A4 which used colossal amounts
of strategic material, manpower and industrial resources
to produce a weapon that had essentially zero military
usefulness.

Keith