Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

I've been thinking ever since I saw this thread that the problem is that whilel there were lots of working "superweapons" in World War II, most of the ones that actually made a difference were beyond boring. I have a very long list for my Unsolicited Manuscript of Doom, The Industrial History of Strategy, but I have no idea whether anyone would care about, say, Quonset Huts, in an RPG context.

Good thing I like hearing myself talk, eh?

And not that Quonset Huts are the most boring superweapons of World War II. Not by a long shot.

My candidate? Bitumised paper. Essentially tar paper, although made of jute and so available in longer lengths.

See, ever since the Romans demonstrated how not to do it, we've known how to make good roads. You take crushed rock (it is important that the rock be handcrushed. Besides making work for the Chain Ga-a-ang, it has to have sharp edges), lay on top of a dirt causeway (with appropriate drainage) and roll it down until the edges grind together creating a water-impervious surface of rock dust. It has to be top-dressed to deal with pneumatic tyres, but otherwise, Bob's your uncle.

Such is the level of civil engineering history that a couple British engineers of the early 19th C., notably that Mr. Macadam fellow, get credit for inventing this.

But there's a problem. The road has to be located near an adequate quarry. The reason that the Arnhem offensive went up a single road is that there was only a single metalled road leading from Belgium to Holland. There's a certain lack of rock in this alluvial landscape, and this is not the first time that the issue shaped military history.

Even worse is the stretch from eastern India to the "civilised" part of Burma. Hundreds of miles of jungle sitting on top of Bay of Bengal alluvial mud. How, oh how, were the Allies to invade Burma without a road connection?

Well, back in the Great War to end all wars, it was noticed that bitumen sprayed on dirt tracks made for an adequate seal. Forumites may have encountered this driving on rural roads, and it was a key ingredient in Marshal Lyautey's campaigns in the 1920s to make North Africa safe for French civilisation forever.

But even this wouldn't work on mud. And so, the brilliant solution. Hundreds of miles of cheap jute carpeting, saturated with bitumen and done up in rolls. Just wind them out over the roads and you get....

Well, something completely sad. But the point is, it worked well enough to provide a main logistic support road for Slim's invasion of Burma.

And also, various fighter airfields throughout the world. And it supported Bengali landowners in their pathetic delusion that the jute craze would last, but that's another story, best told by P. J. O'Rourke.

[bubba smith]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

very interesting thanks

[Cassandra]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

Superweapons

 

The U.S. had the XB-35 Flying Wing Bomber in developement. You can see it in the 1952 movie The War of The Worlds. It had the unintended but welcome adventage of being nearly invisible to radar (The B-2 Spirit Bomber's shape is no coincidence.)

 

The Germans had the Maus (German for Mouse) Panzer, a 125 ton tank with a 125mm cannon backed up by a 75mm cannon. It was so large that it couldn't use standard bridges and had to be equiped with a snorkel.

 

The German's also have about four dozen U-Panzers, Mark 2, 3, and 4 Tanks equiped to move underwater from invasion craft to beaches. As long as they kept moving they were fine but if they stopped while underwater they would get stuck. They were used in the crossing of the Bug River during the Invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941.

[Susano]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

I hope to have my character sheet for Maus posted on my website soon.

[bubba smith]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

very good

[Jagged]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

Nazi Germany recruits bigfoot! It's True! There's pictures and everything!

 

For some reason the line "Bigfoot rose quickly through the ranks" really cracked me up

[McCoy]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

The U.S. came somewhat close to using bats with incendiary devices against the Japanese homeland.

Has anyone mentioned B F Skinner's smart bombs?

[SSgt Baloo]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

Has anyone mentioned B F Skinner's smart bombs?

 

Are you describing the "pidgeon-guided" bombs?

[McCoy]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

Are you describing the "pidgeon-guided" bombs?

Yep. Bird brained smart bombs.

[Guest Major Tom]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

Both Japan and Germany were working on atomic bombs.

 

Japan had two submarines designed to carry aircraft (one carried two, the other five, I believe) to attack the Panama Canal.

 

England had plans for Habakkuk, a feasible aircraft carrier made from an iceberg (price and range made it very limited, however).

 

The U.S. came somewhat close to using bats with incendiary devices against the Japanese homeland.

 

 

You're referring to the Pykrete boat, right?

 

 

Major Tom

[Susano]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

You're referring to the Pykrete boat, right?

 

Yes, the Habakkuk was the ship made from Pykrete.

[TheQuestionMan]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

Justice' date=' Inc. [/b']

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_Hero

 

Golden Age Champions

http://www.nobleknight.com/ProductDetail.asp_Q_ProductID_E_13225_A_InventoryID_E_2147525630_A_ProductLineID_E_160_A_ManufacturerID_E_39_A_CategoryID_E_12_A_GenreID_E_

 

Pulp Hero

https://www.herogames.com/viewItem.htm?itemID=196046

 

Masterminds And Madmen

Thrilling Places

Astounding Hero Tales

The Radio Marauders

The Raven and the Midnight Brigade

Pulp Hero Vehicle Sourcebook, Vol. I

Tablets Of Destiny

Nazi Death-Zombies Of The Congo!

 

GURPS Wildcards

http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/WildCards/

 

GURPS WWII

http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/books/ww2/

 

GURPS WWII: All the King's Men

GURPS WWII: Dogfaces

GURPS WWII: Doomed White Eagle

GURPS WWII: Frozen Hell

GURPS WWII: Grim Legions

GURPS WWII: Hand of Steel

GURPS WWII: Iron Cross

GURPS WWII: Leyte Gulf

GURPS WWII: Michael's Army

GURPS WWII: Motor Pool

GURPS WWII: Return to Honor

GURPS WWII: Their Finest Hour

GURPS WWII: Weird War II

GURPS Weird War II: The Secret of the Gneisenau

 

Battlefield 1942: Secret Weapons Of WWII

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlefield_1942:_Secret_Weapons_Of_WWII

 

Return to Castle Wolfenstein

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_Castle_Wolfenstein

 

Godlike: Superhero Roleplaying in a World on Fire, 1936-1946

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godlike_%28role-playing_game%29

 

Fist of the Rocketmen! (Scott Bennie)

http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=36045

 

Gear Krieg

http://dp9.com/Worlds/GK.htm

 

 

The Rocketeer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rocketeer

 

Airboy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airboy

 

 

Cheers

 

 

QM

 

More Resources Wanted Please!!!

 

 

Thanks

 

 

QM

[Tim]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

NAZI UFOs of WWII

 

with a thanks to Aaron Williams for posting it in his blog

[Zeropoint]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

If it hasn't already been mentioned, you might want to check out the book "My Tank is Fight!". Crazy inventions from WWII that range from "actually happened but didn't affect things much" to "too obviously stupid to make it off the drawing board."

[Susano]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

I have that book on my Amazon wish list.

[Ian Mackinder]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

Mentioned them in other threads, but worth mentioning here as well:

 

'Last Talons Of The Eagle' (Secret Nazi Technology That Could Have Changed The Course Of World War II) by Gary Hyland & Anton Gill.

Details some of the more interesting projects that various groups within the Luftwaffe were working on, most of which never quite made it due to constraints of time and resources. A number of the concepts quite obviously carried over into the present (such as the tactical uses of helicopters).

 

'Blue Fires' (The Lost Secrets Of Nazi Technology) by Gary Hyland.

A sequel to the above, going into the really wild stuff. Some speculation at the end as regards hypothetical tie-ins with the overall UFO phenomenon.

 

*****

 

I should also mention something from 'The World's Worst Aircraft' by James Gilbert. Titled in the book as 'Forssman's Folly', Villehad Forssman was a flamboyant character who came very close to the "Mad Scientist" stereotype. The culmination of his work was a ten-engined aircraft with a wingspan bigger than a Boeing 707's, intended to fly to the US East Coast, drop bombs and return (!).

 

The kicker was that this was during World War One.

 

The only thing left of this project post-war was one of the landing wheels - it stood 7' 8" high. Probably this design would not have worked because Forssman was not as brilliant as he believed (his other designs had an embarassingly high failure rate), but one never knows.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

...And my contributions: actual superweapons of World War II that no-one ever writes about, and for pretty obvious reasons. And no, I'm not doing Quonset Huts.

I give you.....The Merlin Auxiliary Power Drive.

 

I mean, we all know how the Merlin Aeroengine works, right? 12 great big pistons in cylinders, hooked up to a crankshaft by devices too bizarre to imagine, driving a propellor, really, really fast.

Thing is, airplanes don't just need propellors. They need cigarette lighters and stuff.

So, how do you power these? Batteries only last so long, and they're bulky. Most aircraft of the 1920s and 30s actually had little windmills exposed to the air, but they had the same problems as devices hooked up to the propeller shaft --variable output depending on speed-- and more besides, like the world's tiniest, cutest, icing problem.

The answer is that you go right inside the crankcase and hook a little auxiliary shaft up to the crank. You give it a tiny little transmission so that it gives constant rpm, and you lead it out of the case to a little spline head (which then requires the novel carbonitriding hardening treatment) that will drive as many cams as you need to power all those auxiliaries.

It may not seem like much, but the Rolls-Royce Merlin was the first to have a shaft like this, although Bristol then retroengineered it to some older engines promptly afterwards. It is by no means a coincidence that all those warfighting aircraft secondary systems like better radios, gun turrets ---radar-- came along when they did.

[megaplayboy]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

The Germans had SAMs, IR scopes, Nerve Gas, Giant tanks, Giant battleships, advanced subs, plans for suborbital bombers and real ICBMs, swept wing jets, intercontinental bombers, assault rifles, designs for sonic and wind based AA weapons, huge recoilless rifles, guided rockets and bombs, enormous artillery cannon, remote-controlled tracked demolition vehicles, etc...and still lost pretty badly.

The Japanese had bioweapons, superbattleships, battleship/carriers, submarine/carriers, plans for jets, balloon bombs, rocket-propelled suicide aircraft, shrapnel rounds for 18 in guns, midget subs, etc....and still lost pretty badly.

 

The Italians had midget subs and a few other nifty items, but generally were far behind the tech curve.

 

Some useful video game sources of inspiration: Naval Ops, Operation Darkness, Castle Wolfenstein, Bloodrayne.

[Spence]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

 

The Italians had midget subs and a few other nifty items, but generally were far behind the tech curve.

 

 

 

The Italian Navy wasn't that bad ship and hardware wise. They actually had some well built ships that packed a punch.

 

The problem was they were manned by...well...Italians....

 

 

 

 

[megaplayboy]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

The Italian Navy wasn't that bad ship and hardware wise. They actually had some well built ships that packed a punch.

 

The problem was they were manned by...well...Italians....

 

 

 

 

 

That's true, they had a series of pretty modern battleships.

 

They also came out with some pretty capable fighters right before they dropped out of the war.

And I'd almost consider the CR-42B to be a superweapon of sorts...I mean, a biplane that can fly at 325 mph is pretty kewl, right?

[Ian Mackinder]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

The Japanese had ... shrapnel rounds for 18 in guns.

 

Trouble was that those rounds tended to do horrible things to the rifling of the gun barrels, so they tended to avoid using them.

[Spence]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

That's true, they had a series of pretty modern battleships.

 

They also came out with some pretty capable fighters right before they dropped out of the war.

And I'd almost consider the CR-42B to be a superweapon of sorts...I mean, a biplane that can fly at 325 mph is pretty kewl, right?

 

There no questioning they had some serious hardware, they just didn't know how to use it effectively. Kinda reminds be of most of the people who own large pickups and SUV's up here. They don't know how to drive a kiddycart let alone something large. Just watching them try to park can make you just want to cry.......or try to beat the stupid out of someone

[Spence]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

Trouble was that those rounds tended to do horrible things to the rifling of the gun barrels' date=' so they tended to avoid using them.[/quote']

 

Hmmmmm.....

 

save the rifling but be sunk by enemy aircraft...

 

or...

 

not get sunk but loss some rifling.

 

I think they made the wrong choice.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

I was thinking about doing Plexiglas or automatic carburettors for this one; but, hey, time for some land warfare.

 

It may be that I grew up in an odd corner of the world, where the Highways Ministry inherited a great many old logging roads that didn't particularly warrant upkeep on the basis of traffic, but the Bailey Bridge doesn't need any introduction to me.

For everyone else, the concept is simple. Armies need roads that cross rivers. (And gorges, swamps, cuttings, lakes...). Civil engineering has a solution to this. You design a bridge to meet the individual situation, and you build it on site. Armies build bridges, too. The problem is that it has to be done quite quickly, and moving building materials around in the area behind the front means competing for road space with supplies and reinforcements.

Worse, how does a pursuing army cross bridges? In the old days, they had this marvelous modular system for building bridges, called "carpentry." The army carried some canoes around with it for flotation. Everything else just required some trees.

As guns got heavier in the late 1800s, this approach fell out of favour. By the beginning of WWI, most armies had a few standardised bridge parts that they carried along with them. But to illustrate just how far they had to go to reach World War II standards, it probably suffices to point out that the heaviest load that the British army bridge had to carry, including their 4.5" [60 pounder] heavy howitzer, was the battalion chuckwagon.

 

The big learning moment was the German retreat to the Hindenburg Line. Commonwealth forces were pretty improvised by this time. Having learned that standard field artillery had far too short a range for modern conditions, they had come to depend on the 9.2" siege howitzer in lieu. It was rather big for the job, but the design was there.... Well, the Germans blew up the bridges as they retreated, and Commonwealth forces found that they had to leave their 9.2"s behind. It took a long time to bring them up again, and they still weren't really ready to fight, what with one thing and another, when the German spring offensives began.

 

By the time WWII was in sight, the new British standard modular bridging unit could carry a load of up to 20 tons --one important reasons that British, like most other Western European tanks, were limited to that weight range. (The French decided that they were going to rely on rail bridges, and the Russians didn't have many bridges, and took the view that a tank should be bigger/have lower tread pressure, in order to follow oxcart trails that forded streams and crossed river ice in winter. This actually ended up working out rather well for them.)

 

What was needed was to take the modular idea and take it to another level --basically a complete Mechano set out of which bridges of all kinds of widths, lengths, approaches and carrying capacity could be assembled. It sounds like a straightforward proposition. Some pieces would have Flange A, some would have Slot B, and you'd assemble a bridge by sticking A into B as required, depending on whether you were crossing a mountain stream that went through a gorge, a canal sticking up 10 feet above the surrounding countryside, or even making a cloverleaf overpass on the Main Supply Route south of Rome.

The problem was that while making zero-tolerance inter-unit compatibility is easy with, say, Lego, it was something that had never been done before with welded steel pieces this size. To do it, the researchers at the Road Research Institute tell us, they had to improve the quality control for residual coal content in British high-quality plain steel castings by a figure of 10. It was hard, they tell us, although since most of us aren't steel foundry quality control engineers, all we can really do is nod our heads and say to ourselves. "Wow. Ten times is a lot of times. That really must have been hard."

It was hard enough, to put it in perspective, that the entire first batch of American Bailey Bridge parts were screwed up. (Just to show that American engineers can do, the next batch were an improved design that the Brits promptly adopted.) But the result was a modular bridge design that could take anything up to a 70 ton tank at need.

There was also a Bailey Railway Bridge that saw limited use, mostly to replace demolished docks, but sometimes on actualy railways, and a Bailey Suspension Bridge that seems to have been a solution in search of a problem. The next generation of stuff is much cooler. There even used to be a Janes Book devoted to them, but unless the Warsaw Pact invades Western Europe sometime soon and blows up all the Rhine bridges, we're not likely to ever see them in action.

[Spence]

Re: Golden Age Resources: Superweapons of WW II

 

but unless the Warsaw Pact invades Western Europe sometime soon and blows up all the Rhine bridges' date=' we're not likely to ever see them in action. [/quote']

 

IMO opinion some of the coolest accounts and best books on equipment are those to do with Combat Engineers of all types and years.