Luftwaffe Thread Bonus points for cool jets.

Is it true that early ME jets used by the Luftwaffe towards the end of the war were deemed too fast to be reliably used against much slower Allied aircraft? Or is that fuddlore

>>32934827
that was some of the pilots.

>>32934827
Its fuddlore. Jet fighters in WW2 were just too expensive to reliably deploy against fighters in WW2. They were bomber interceptors because fighters weren't what killing the Germans.

The primarily tactic used by Luftwaffe fighter pilots was the boom n' zoom, which meant they dived on their targets, and then used the speed from the dive to quickly get away.
The Me 262 picked up so much speed in a dive that it lost almost all of it's maneuverability, which eliminated any flexibility in terms of changing target, or altering course to account for the enemy aircraft swerving to dodge.

>>32934885
were they not also used to destroy fighters?

>>32934827
It's complete fuddlore.

Also, just preemptively saying this:

>if Hitler hadn't delayed
>if they had gotten it out sooner
>if they had just built more

You have no idea how R&D cycles work. You have no idea how production cycles work. You have no idea how the logistics of air power work. No Me-262 would be coming out earlier than it did. As it was, it entered service with less than a quarter of the normal flight testing hours, and it showed.

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>>32934764

>>32935098
>horton 229
Good taste anon.

>>32934827
Nothing is too fast to be used against slower aircraft so of course it's fuddlore. If your fuel control is crude and you can't do fast snaps with your throttle you dive through the enemy formation hauling arse and keep going.

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>>32934827
There's a bit of truth to it. The issue that pilots had with many faster aircraft like the Me 262 was that they were significantly faster than the bombers they were supposed to kill, and were armed with low-velocity Mk 108 cannons. That meant that they had a very short window in which they could actually engage a target as they came upon it.

But they were hardly "too fast." The Me 262 (briefly) managed to attain kill ratios the Luftwaffe deemed necessary to make strategic bombing unsustainable, and the complaints seem to be more one of inexperienced pilots being unused to the radical change in tactics than anything else.

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>>32934827
ME jets used toward the end of the war had a habit of breaking apart in light gee manuevers because making a jet plane out of wood and gluing the wings and tail onto the main airframe was stupid.

So maybe? who knows, of course an English Electric Lightning could intercept sub-sonic Bears fairly easily.

The Luftwaffe did have a problem intercepting US bombers with the Komet because its speed combined with limited time in the air due to the fuel consumption rate of its rocket engine combined with heavy german cannons firing relatively slow and short ranged rounds meant that it was hard for pilots to line up a good shot and hit bombers, so there were trials with a top mounted set of cannons that would fire up in response to a bomber's shadow passing overhead and triggering some light sensors that fired the guns when the Komet flew just underneath bombers.

but the tiny amount of time the Komet could stay in the air meant that each komet flight tended to not be able to take out more than one bomber no matter what techniques they used, which meant the resources going into them were nonsense relative to the defensive impact they could have, especially given Allied production rates.

>>32935279
>gluing the wings and tail onto the main airframe was stupid.
The problem wasn't the construction techniques, but the quality of the glue and wood laminate - the factories were fucked by the end of the war, so they weren't able to get the glue quality necessary to make the He 162 safe to fly.

>EE Lightning could intercept the Bear
There's a difference between a jet interceptor (which is still designed for high subsonic cruise) keeping up with the fastest prop-driven aircraft in the world and a high-subsonic fighter trying to keep pace with bombers barely managing 200mph.

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>>32935279

Also a caveat needs to be understood in relation to ww2 aircraft and speeds - the ME jets weren't THAT fast, just barely flying faster than twin prop mosquito light bombers. To put things entirely in perspective, the british tactic for intercepting V-1 ramjet missiles was for high speed modified spitfires or Meteor Jet fights to fly up to the ramjet, get their wing under the wing of the ramjet and then roll sharply to make the ramjet spin out of control.

mostly what luftwaffe jets and rocket planes could do was *out climb* allied planes, which obviously gave a huge advantage to the Boom & Zoom aces of the luftwaffe, and was basically useless in the hands of rookie pilots who'd get caught in turning fights with pairs of lighter aircraft.

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>>32935325

They weren't very high-sub-sonic fighters though, especially as they'd usually be meeting the bombers in a sustained climb - the problem was that bombers moved in large formations that meant the fighters couldn't really hang around and get a good bead on bombers, just get into a position to make a pass through the formation and hope they had lined up (while at a considerable distance and doing this all by eye and guesstimate) to get a good hit on the bombers in passing.

In that situation they really needed a good stand off weapon strapped to boring old prop fighters rather than boring old cannons and guns on good jet fighters.

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>>32934827

you're right about them being fast, but good?

>be kraut pilot in me262

>mfw lowering throttle too quickly would result in a flameout / compressor stall
>mfw increasing throttle too quickly would result in engines overheating, then exploding
>mfw changes in speed had to be incremented slowly, dead slow, over the course of a few minutes
>mfw this meant the only times pilots could adjust the speed without risking death was during take off and landing

But wait there's more!

>8-12 hours of flight time before you have to replace both engines
>going fast as fuck is the only realistic option you have
>it's not only fast but in tight turns the loss of speed is minimal compared to allied fighters

This thing was so fast that it couldn't even slow down via dive brakes, because it didn't have any.

Why you may ask? The same reason why panzer 3s and 4s didn't have slopped armor, kraut engineering.

It couldn't slow down in combat under any circumstance, which would've helped a lot when you're trying to line up your 30mm guns at an allied bomber.

These short barrelled 30mm guns with accuracy up to 600m, in combat you're going 500mph whether you like it or not, the bombers you're trying to shoot down are going 120-200mph.....

So when you got within 700m, you had 2-3 seconds, going 500mph, to hit something huge, that will get even huger if you piss off its bombs, but it's most likely you'll miss and pull away at 500m.

Think about that, It was so ahead of its time that if a bomber was engaged by one of these fine works of art, the best option for the bomber was to keep flying straight ahead and reduce speed.

>be RAF britbongs flying towards dresden
>notice tracers near window
>oy would you look at that govna, Fritz is shooting at us with his special plane
>again?!?!? don't worry about it old chap, if Fritz shoots us down, there's a good chance we'll take him with us
>but if he doesn't shoot us down we get to kill more krauts

>if Fritz kills us, we win

>>32935338
>>32935392
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjXr9Nj5ZbI&t

>>32935338
One aircraft rolled a V1 that way. And he rolled quite gently, because he had a big ass bomb next to him.