Western Wanderwaffe

Birdjaguar said:
Most military innovation is slow change. The machine gun, whose ancestry your link to, took decades of development to really shine. The same with tanks. Drones are in their infancy now but I think in 20 years they will be "wonder weapons" in common use. The atomic bomb was one "wonder weapon" that had a quick development and significant impact as soon as it was used. Rifle technology had a slow steady development: flintlocks to percussion caps to bullets to clips. WWs concept is mostly PR and terror under pinned by hope that it will be a winner. It is the nature of innovation in general. Everyone, including the military, wants to create game changing tech to make all the previous tech obsolete. It does happen, but even then such innovations usually have deep roots that are ignored to the glorification of the inventor.
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Drones have been around since the 90s afaik.
 
Zardnaar said:
Drones have been around since the 90s afaik.
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They have been, but the Ukrainian invasion has expanded their use and opened up new ways of using them. AI will add another dimension as will 3D printing. For military tech, a new war is the fastest way to get "improvements". Until Russia invaded Ukraine, how were drones used and how were they used? Compare that to what we have seen in Ukraine in the past year.
 
Kyriakos said:
3d printing has been here since the 80s, so even worse of an example than drones being new.
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Yes 3D printing has been possible since the 80s, but it wasn’t until 2006 that the first SLS printer became commercially available. It took 20 years or so for the devices to move out of prototyping and specialty work. That is standard for many/most new tech. Cheap drones perhaps made or assembled on the battlefield are likely. What is new is that drones can now be everywhere and are disposable. You can fly them from phones. What makes drones a new WW is that they can be effective, cheap and prolific. Your example the mitrailleuse took a similar path to greatness to become a machine gun. That was a wonder weapon of WW 1. And as your link stated, the mitrailleuse failed, not because it was of poor design, but because they did not know how to use it effectively. Everyone is now learning how to use drones effectively.

In 1999 Sandia National Labs was a leading developer of 3D printing for DOD projects and their results with cheap plastic parts were mostly poor and unsuited for any commercial or military use where detail or precision was required. The company I worked for then was part of a tech outreach program they had. Our subsidized cost for small 2'x4" cubical like shapes was about $500 each. Ridiculously expensive and a huge loss of quality compared to traditional casting.
 
Zardnaar said:
Aware if very early ones but very little control iirc.
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Point being it’s a very old technology. Control was a major problem for aviation in general throughout WW1, hence the reputation it was for daredevils, but soon the industry developed a much more sophisticated and careful understanding of the nature of aerodynamic control. The main issue was managing landing since after a certain point they could teach these things to maintain a glide slope with no more than a gyroscope and some string. Landing though is hard even if you’re in the damn aircraft. In my opinion it’s because you have to reduce power to land and that obligates you to feel the air more; little chance of that if you’re not even in the aircraft to feel it move.

But back then, drones became useful soon as flying targets and decoys, and that was the role they served. Eventually you had computers and sensors, but for decades remote control planes were controlled by eyesight, intuition, and engineering. We also have electric motors now which means quadrotors, which are easy to control.

The rocket wunderwaffe in my mind is similar in that it wasn’t especially useful except for terror when it debuted, but Peenemünde had yielded some crucial rocket tech and even more important than the tech itself was the school of German rocket engineering as a whole. They were experts who had pioneered and mastered it and even then it wasn’t useful in war until you had nukes to put in the damn things. Space was a fun diversion by comparison. And then you had the Saturn V, the high water mark of rocket engineering… which I often think about because I think about it never once failing a launch, never blowing up or crashing or going off course. It had five rocket engines only and could achieve the Apollo missions. No rocket ever failed. Now we have the Falcon Heavy or Starship stuffed with three dozen or more engines and they fail all the time. Not always of course, they can get the job done with some reservations. But getting to the moon, a place we’ve already been, should be like circumnavigating the globe twice right?

Alas. The thing about Greek fire is that they eventually forgot how to make it.
 
There's a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, where he presents a case where more advanced weapons led to losing the war. But when there are actually massive differences in tech, the result tends to be the opposite.
 
do we mean undeserved hype? That can be answered more honestly than guessing what will really be a game-changer without seeing it in action first.

The A-10
*puts up flame shield*
but seriously, it was never really tested in the conditions it was made for i.e. fighting against a massive tank assault presumably in then-West Germany. Perhaps if there was an 1) isolated place where ground forces were taking fire which was 2) too distant for the AH64 chopper for fly to and 3) too difficult to laser-designate for the F15 for whatever reason and 4) anti-aircraft fire was minimal and 5) you needed to loiter for a bit and not immediately r.t.b., then yeah, flying treetop level and going BRRRRR! with the big GAU Avenger might make tactical sense if not for pure morale value. Youtuber LazerPig has been quite critical of it, and he sort-of won me over a bit.
But still, it's neat-looking plane that I'd hate to see retired. Many years ago I used to play a game exclusive to the Mac called A10 Attack and fell in love with it.

honorable mention:
Phalanx CIWZ
Not to say it can't do it's job now, but I really worry about the future where it's not a couple of anti-ship missiles but potentially hundreds of bomb-carrying drones coming at your ship. It's going to be tough for a honkin' 20mm round to hit one of those little s.o.b.'s head-on. Which is why I hope the USN falls back on the old 5-inch guns that can just blast a bucket-full of shrapnel in the air and knock down any drones.
 
the A-10 is a B-26 replacement for Counter-Insurgency . Not an A-1 replacement because Vought would have won that , too and again . A-10 and its competitor A-9 survived the end of Vietnam War to justify the cancellation of AH-56 , yet another wonder from Lockmart , likely to prove even more interesting compared to the saga and whatnot of the F-35 . It did that solely because of the gun , because the US Army would never give up its attack helicopters and Close Air Support always means trouble for USAF detracting it from what it wants above all things . Which is killing civilians in some "strategic campaign" . The gun to defeat the tanks , promising multiple kills in each sortie in an era guided weapons are making their name , but are still too expensive to purchase and fickle in operation . And the catch to that is the radiactive ammunition , so that killed and damaged tanks will not be quickly regenarated on the move . That US Army could not really argue against . A-10 also takes advantage of the feelings against the wonder weapons , the Fighter Mafia group enlisted Rudel , a Nazi of repute , to sell the "son of the Thunderbolt" , the P-47 that did really fine in smashing Nazis .

that said A-10 kinda sorta better than hyped .

the Phalanx problem is not drones but peer missiles . Which is going to be fast and stuff . Clearly not a fan of the Gatling system but check what the Chinese have been doing:

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their standart has 11 barrels of 30mm , 50% up on GAU-8 , and this one in test in 2021 has 20 .
 
Regarding the effect of the atomic weapons available at the end of WW2, specifically against Japan, it may be that they were not what forced Japan to capitulate (it would have capitulated, but not with unconditional surrender). Similar effect could be had with firebombing. Some have argued that the decisive parameter there was that while Japan was not at war with USSR up to that point, USSR declared war on it - which would have meant that Japan losing would also lead to permanently lost 'home islands' territory to the USSR. It's a position which famously has been argued by Dyson Freeman.
In that respect, it makes perfect sense to agree to all US demands immediately, so that you can avoid losing considerable 'home-islands' territory to another major power.
Of course that was in ww2. Right now, nuclear weapons are more powerful and far more numerous, and could obliterate everything. Nuclear weapons are also what has - up to now - prevented another world war.
 
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Kyriakos said:
Regarding the effect of the atomic weapons available at the end of WW2, specifically against Japan, it may be that they were not what forced Japan to capitulate (it would have capitulated, but not with unconditional surrender). Similar effect could be had with firebombing. Some have argued that the decisive parameter there was that while Japan was not at war with USSR up to that point, USSR declared war on it - which would have meant that Japan losing would also lead to permanently lost 'home islands' territory to the USSR. It's a position which famously has been argued by Dyson Freeman.
In that respect, it makes perfect sense to agree to all US demands immediately, so that you can avoid losing considerable 'home-islands' territory to another major power.
Of course that was in ww2. Right now, nuclear weapons are more powerful and far more numerous, and could obliterate everything. Nuclear weapons are also what has - up to now - prevented another world war.
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It's not that deep, it was a wunderwaffe because it was a portable sun that worked entirely as advertised.
 
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