(John Redman) wrote in message . com...
"Charles Talleyrand" wrote in message ...
Lets suppose you get to give a single new airplane design and a single prototype
to a participant of World War One. You can offer the Austro-Hungarians the
design for a B-52 if you wish. However, that might prove a manufacturing
challenge to them (and one can only wonder about their supply of jet fuel).

Your goal is to change history. You can hope for a German victory or just that the
Allies win faster. It's up to you.

So, what design do you offer, remembering that this design must be manufactured, fueled,
and armed by the natives?

Any such aircraft could, I suggest, have a decisive effect in only two
circumstances.

One would be if the technology behind it were so difficult for the
other participants to knock off that it became and remained dominant
for long enough to provide air supremacy. This assumes that air
supremacy would have been decisively useful, and I'm not sure it would
have been with anything built in 1914-18 (and given that you've used
your trump card to achieve the supremacy in the first place).

Getting the supremacy sounds like a job for a fighter, eg the Fokker
E-I in 1915. Using it decisively sounds like one for a bomber, and if
I think about bombers that have had a decisive effect on surface
campaigns, I struggle to think of any that did not rely on other
factors. Eg the Stuka was arguably a decisive weapon but only if you
had the Bf109 to clear its path, and I doubt if you could have built
one in 1914-8 anyway.

The other circumstance in which the aircraft would be useful is if its
availability enabled an attack, or the threat of an attack, that would
severely discourage further participation in the war by the attackee.
In this context, it seems to me that the best candidate would be an
effective long-range torpedo bomber. A version of the Handley-Page
0/400 deployed in Malta, say 24 strong, might have been able to sink
Goeben before she escaped to Constantinople in 1914. This in turn
might make it more difficult for Germany to get Turkey into the war on
her side, thus removing the need for the Triple Entente to fight on an
additional front.

From the German perspective, a wing of Zeppelin-Staakens deployed in
1914 within range of Scapa Flow might have presented enough of a
threat to the Grand Fleet that it would be reluctant to occupy that
anchorage. The threat of U-boat attack drove the Grand Fleet back to
the west coast of Scotland, so this does not seem improbable. If the
threat of severe dreadnought loss was sufficient, it might deter
Britain from joining in in the first place, or at least until a
countermeasure had been evolved. This would of course have offered
Germany a window in which to secure the early defeat of France.

This would, though, require a port attack. I doubt whether such a
squadron could have executed an effective attack on a fleet at sea.
PoW and Repulse were despatched by 50 torpedo bombers carrying larger
and more effective torpedoes than Germany possessed in 1914. They were
also about 6 times faster than the ships they were attacking. A 1914
60-knot Gotha might have trouble threatening a division of WW1
battlecruisers doing half their own speed. You'd also need a lot of
them because if took 50 WW2 era bombers to sink one WW1 BC and one WW2
BB, you'd need still more to offset the fact of fewer less potent hits
distributed among many more targets.

One ISOT story from Analog about a guy flying a cross between an SR-71
and and a F-35, hyper sonic and VTOL. He joins the Allies, can't get a
lock on his missiles against the WWI Germans but eventually does a
mach 3.0 sweep through a German circus. He needed to filter the 1917
kerosene through chamois for fuel.