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Originally Posted by Twitch
The only thing off in your scenario T.A. is the fact that without von Braun and company or the chaps Russia got, there could be no successful US missile program.
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Obviously, you know
nothing of late WW 2 and post war US missile development.
Paperclip engineers under von Braun worked exclusively for the US Army first at White Sands and later at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. The 300 or so German engineers had no input into what became the most important IRBM and ICBM developments in the US. These came from US Navy and Air Force projects that
had little or no input from von Braun, Paperclip, or wartime German sources.
For example, the US had a working copy of the V-1 just 60 days after the first was fired on England. As for the V-2, collected parts and intelligence was given to Consolidated and under the direction of one of their engineers, Charles Bossart, Consolidated came up with an improved V-2, the MX 774, with triple the range and double the payload. His team's two biggest innovations on this project (which became world standards for ballistic missiles since then) were the elimination of the airframe in favor of stressed skin tanks using internal pressure for rigidity and swivelling nozzles for rocket engines.
If you want a run down, the US was ahead of the Germans in SAM technology by the beginning of 1945 having the Nike series in development for the US Army and Typhoon and Bumblebee (became Talos, Terrier and, Tartar SAMs) for the US Navy. The JB-3 Tiamat AAM became the AIM 4 Falcon post war. The USN had the Bat ASM in service. This led eventually to the development of the Bullpup missile. That service was also developing what became the Sparrow AAM at China Lake in 1945.
The list is long and just literally dwarfs the miniscule program the Germans had in this area. For example, the Germans weren't even contemplating an ABM, yet the US had studies underway by the University of Michigan and General Electric (projects MX 794, and 795) for ones with characteristics of 550 mile range, 500,000 foot altitude. There were projects for sonic and subsonic cruise missiles as well as ballastic missiles in progress.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Twitch
The timeline wouldn't quite work on the KaiserWilhelm's scenerio to me. I say why would the Germans wait till 1953 when they had a nuke in 1947 and both ICBMs in the A-9/A-10 IRBMs in the A-4b family and an intercontinental jet bomber with the Horten 18B? These would have been available by 1947 given Kaiser's perameters with many others on the way. So I'm starting my attack early, in 1948. Hehehe!  1947, 2 years later, is a realistic timeline for the Germans to have redone their experiment using a pure sample of graphite as a moderator and having success.
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You do know, historically, the US had the Atlas ICBM in testing in 1953 and scheduled for operational deployment by 1957. Titan, a true ICBM was not far behind with expected operational service in 1960. Thor and Jupiter IRBMs were already in service. The Navy was working towards having Polaris in service.
In addition, various cruise missiles were either in service or development including: Regulus, Snark, Navajo, Matador, Lacross among others.
AAMs in service included Sidewinder, Sparrow, and Falcon. In SAMs the Nike Ajax and Hercules were deployed with Zeus coming on line, the F-99 Bormac was deployed and the Navy had Talos and Terrier in service.
As far as your own plan goes: The A-9, or winged A-4 / V-2 (aka A-4b), was a total failure in the few tests attempted. The A-10, planned as an A-4 successor, called for a 4000 kg warhead, on a 100 to 180 ton thrust missile with a range of about 500 NM. This project was shelved in 1942 and never got beyond basic design calculations. It really couldn't even be called a drawing board project.
The ICBM A-11 and 12 were never more than conceptual ideas of Von Braun and other Peenemünde engineers. These never even got to design stage. So, to go from literally nothing to a working ICBM in just what, two to five years? It isn't going to happen. First, the Germans would need to develop far better airframes than the one that the A-4/V-2 was using. Then they would have to come up with alternative fuel mixtures to the low efficency LOX - alcohol one in use. RFNA or LOX and gasoline are two possibilities they knew about. But, using gasoline would be difficult given other priorities. LOX - H2 is possible but the technology isn't in place for it.
Then there is guidance. The simple gyroscopic mechanical mechanisms the V-2 used would not be accurate enough for an ICBM. Development of high temperature metals for the engines would be necessary. Alot more study of upper atmospherics and the Earth's magnetic field along with radiation effects on electronics is also necessary before getting an ICBM to work.
Post war, the US ran three concurrent major IRBM programs and two ICBM ones taking nearly ten years to deliver a working IRBM and another ten to get to an ICBM. The Soviets were even slower with their program. Yet, you think the Germans on a fraction of the budget, with a fraction of the personnel, with only one working program can do it in less than five?!
As for intercontinential bombers, there is no knowing that the Horten would have proved successful. Northrop's jet flying wing bomber proved a failure, even while the propeller driven version worked. The B-36 was a true intercontinential bomber but by 1947 it is highly vulnerable to interception. Of course, it could have carried an ASM like Rascal and simply nuked its target from 300 miles out instead of running the risk of interception. For the Germans the danger is the US Navy could (and likely would) have carriers in the flight paths of German bombers making them far more risk prone to interception by either fighters or missiles while enroute.
As far as nuclear reactors go, the graphite moderated fast fission reactor only gives a working basis for research initially. The Germans would still have to come up with a mass producable method of seperating U235 from U238 as the US had. The alternative would be to discover Plutonium and then produce it in a larger fast fission breeder reactor as the US was doing at Hanford Washington. Either way, the program will need to be quite large and very expensive up front. I doubt that the Nazi hierarchy would stand for it; particularly if the US beat the Japanese without using a nuclear weapon....a very, very likely scenario here.
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Originally Posted by Twitch
Hitler would still have the majority of Europe to exploit for whatever he needed to finance weapons or whatnot. Without the exodous and capturing of scientists in 1945 Germany would still have all her tech people. Where would they have gone?
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Stripping countries of their wealth to finance an arms race is a poor way to go. Germany would still need to trade with the rest of the world for many resources not available within their empire. Oil would still be a big problem. Even with access to ex-soviet fields their production would be far less than total demand.
As for an exodus? Just as happened with the Soviet empire post war many people fled to the West. A Nazi police state with strict racial, social, and academic restrictions would have given plenty of incentive for defectors to leave.
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Originally Posted by Twitch
Type XXIs would have gone over to nuclear power and actually had proven ways to launch nuclear missiles close to the US shores.
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The Type XXI would have been quickly eclipsed by post war naval developments just as it historically was. The biggest problem it would face is the late war US - British development of what were essentially phased array sonars (scanning sonars). These owe nothing to German technology being entirely US and British inventions. By 1953 the US subs would have had some equivalent of PUFFS aboard giving them 3 dimensional fire control while submerged.
The Germans would have been falling behind simply because the Navy was not an important player politically. Nuclear power for Germany, as I pointed out, was a political no-no being viewed by the top Nazi hierarchy as "Jewish science." With no great amount of political support how are the Germans going to do much of anything with nuclear power?
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Originally Posted by Twitch
Any interconental US bombers would arrive over Europe unescorted greeted by an array of SAMs that were near deployment in 1945 anyhow. Then the 2nd generation jets with TOW guided missiles with 5 mile range would clean up even B-52s.
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The B-52 program started in 1944 along with a large number of other jet aircraft projects for the US. US jet engine technology rapidly eclipsed that of the Germans and with the British providing additional engineering the two nations dominated the engine market post war completely. Even the Russians were relying on unlicsensed copies of their engines.
As for SAMs, the Germans were moving down the wrong track entirely. They went with command guided missiles using optical control that they could not get to work. Note how the
Wasserfall SAM program missile went virtually untested in the US at White Sands (a total of just 3 launches) then was abandoned as a worthless system. The other two German SAMs of the wartime period were not even considered beyond technical review by the US.
The wartime X-4 Ruhrstahl AAM was, likewise, a joke of a missile. Its guidance was unworkable, it had an untried and ludicrious acoustic fuze mechanism. So, the Germans would have gone into the post war period with dead end systems needing completely new thinking. This is unlikely to happen in the intellectual vacuum of Nazi politics.
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Originally Posted by Twitch
Without German aero engineers the B-47 and B-52 would have straight wing for chrissake!
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Swept wings hardly constitute a viable aerodynamics program on their own. Having intelligence operatives that spot aircraft flying with swept wings would have let the cat out of the bag on that one. The US has wind tunnels and aircraft engineers too.
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Originally Posted by Twitch
Conclusion- without von Braun and his group or the far larger soviet-bound group neither the US or Russia would have done jack in the missile field, so far ahead was Germany. If left unmolested to carry on von Braun would have had not only the group that actually went to the US but all the people that the Russkies grabbed. These were the entirely of the people who in actuality built the missile programs of the USSR and USA. Without them there would have been no missile programs as they existed in the 50s-60s.
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Your conclusions are wrong as demonstrated above. While German technology contributed some to post war developments it was hardly earth shattering or so critical that the same developments couldn't have occured without it.
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Originally Posted by Twitch
So any advances and vehicles that came out of early 50s USSR would have been coming out of Germany. Having V-2 parts isn't the same as having von Braun. The stuff the Americans were having him do in New Mexico he had ALREADY done in Gemany- intermediate missiles, radar guidance, multi stage ICBMs, bio-chemical warheads- opps! not yet, etc. He was teaching the Americans.
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Having V-2 parts got the US the MX 774 in short order trumping the mediocre V-2 and without any German engineering input. It also got the US the Atlas and Titan with no German input. The same goes for virtually evey system I mentioned herein. The von Braun team had input into Private, Corporal, and Sergeant missiles for the US Army and gave some technical input on NASA programs. They did nothing for USAF and USN programs. White Sands was just one of many US development locations. There were also labs at GALCIT (became the JPL in California), ORDCIT (became Redstone), von Karman labs New Jersey, MIT, University of Michigan, and then there are the private contractors....
Quote:
Originally Posted by Twitch
Any missile technology the Americans would have had without Germans would have been about 10 years behind the German efforts. They might have been comparable to Iraq compared to the US in the 1990s.
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You have this backwards. And this doesn't even hit on other things like Cadillac I and II giving the US AWACs capacity....something the Germans hadn't even
conceived as a program by 1945.