New Airplanes in WWI (ISOT)

On 8 Jun 2004 22:23:24 -0700, (alfred
montestruc) wrote:

Probably a Japanese Zero. The Zero could land and take off on a
relitivly short grass runway as long as the ground is not soft. The
engine should be within their capacity to build, and that is the main
thing, a late 1930's evolved internal combustion aircraft engine with
lots of power.

The airframe had lots of wood and nothing very sophisticated in terms
of metal parts. The 20mm cannons would make it's firepower something
to be feared.

A Zero would be a terror of the sky in 1918, it can outrun and out
climb everything else. A small number with fuel and ammunition can
rout the other side's airforce and do nasty things in ground attack,
and recon especially given their speed and range.

I'd go for a Me163...

Dangerous, yes, but doable...

Cheers,
Richard

"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).

Given the lack of high-powered engines, would some of the early autogyro
designs be easier to produce than a more advanced airplane?
--
Zamboni

"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.

(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.

In article ,
(Jack Linthicum) writes:

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.

"Hawk Among the Sparrows" (Dang, I forgot who wrote it).
The aircraft was the Pika-Don, a carrier-based hypersonic VTOL (It had
skids, rather than wheels, so it wasn't a VSTOL) used for intercept
ICBM warheads.

--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster

"John Redman" wrote in message om...
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.

I don't think this is clear.

Lets assume that the Germans get something like a 1920's
fighter and that it will be a year before the allies can copy it.

A sudden decisive air domination means that the allies have
no arial recon ability. Just that alone could change battles.
A fighter from the 1920s can knock out railroad lines
and bridges, which is a large logistics problem.

Basically, a fighter form the 1920s means that the Germans can
mass for an attack without the Allies knowledge and
can reduce the Allies ability to reinforce the attacked spot.

Even if you think the French can overcome these problems, I doubt the
Russians and/or Serbs can. An early fall of Russia gives Germany the
war.

Sure, it's not the nuclear weapons of World War One, but the war
was such a close thing that the teeter-totter can be made to fall
the other way.

Talleyrand
Who is just as willing to argue for the Allies use of airplanes

"Charles Talleyrand" wrote

A sudden decisive air domination means that the allies have
no arial recon ability. Just that alone could change battles.

Debatable - neither side had useful air recon in 1914, but nobody
seriously suggests this affected events. Also, you can do air recon
over a trench system from a balloon, and you don't need fighters to
defend balloons. You just need to protect them with artillery whose
fuses are pre-set to the height at which an attacking scout would
approach.

A few hundred Fokker D-VIIs would secure air supremacy for whichever
side had them, but I question whether this would change land battles.
AFAIK Germany had air superiority for much of the war, and this didn't
materially alter outcomes on the ground.

A fighter from the 1920s can knock out railroad lines
and bridges, which is a large logistics problem.

Which 1920s fighters could lift, and deliver accurately, a payload
large enough to destroy a militarily-useful bridge? Dive-bombing was
invented in the late 1920s largely because bombloads were so small
that you needed either a huge air force, or direct hits, to cause
worthwhile damage. It was the 1940s before small, agile aircraft
became powerful enough to lift a decent payload - Hurricanes armed
with rockets, for instance. Once you had 1,000hp engines, a lot of
things became possible. I can't see a 1,000hp engine much earlier than
when they did arrive - the mid-1930s.

Even if you think the French can overcome these problems, I doubt the
Russians and/or Serbs can. An early fall of Russia gives Germany the
war.

German war planning was the actually other way around though:
seven-eighths of their forces attacked France because the
Schlieffen-Moltke Plan said that that was how you beat Russia. You
beat France first. If you weren't at war with France, well, you
gratuitously took steps to make sure you were, by demanding insulting
guarantees of neutrality.

The Schlieffen-Moltke Plan further specified that you defeated France
by violating Belgian neutrality. Britain specifically asked Germany in
July 1914 whether she would respect Belgian neutrality in a war with
France. Germany refused to do so, because the Schlieffen Plan could
not be modified, so you invaded Belgium even if this resulted in war
with Britain.

Thus, German doctrine in 1914 effectively was that the best chance of
beating Russia was to go to war simultaneously with Russia, France,
and Britain.

Sure, it's not the nuclear weapons of World War One, but the war
was such a close thing that the teeter-totter can be made to fall
the other way.

Unfortunately, including France and Britain in the war ensured defeat;
and the trench stalemate proved impossible for Germany to break even
after Russia was eventually removed from the allied line-up.