
The V-2 - spking
http://www.astronautix.com/v/v-2.html
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i_am_proteus
Werner von Braun's goal as a scientist/engineer was always to travel past
Earth. That the V-2 (and later U.S. military rockets) were stepping stones to
that goal did not seem to bother him as long as he made progress.

Oft quoted regarding the V-2, perhaps apocryphal: "The rocket worked
perfectly, except for landing on the wrong planet."

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T-A
It's been a few years since I last posted this, so I think I'm in the clear:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro)

"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down. That's not my
department, says Wernher von Braun."

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spking
Another fun one:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXIDFx74aSY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXIDFx74aSY)

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redwood
I've been watching Man in the High Castle and one of the interesting aspects
of the story is the contemplation of the pace of German technological
innovation had they won the war.

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lenticular
It's really highly exaggerated, both in that show and in popular culture.
Nazis would not have travelled to Mars by the 1960s, and they wouldn't have
supersonic civilian airliners. Nazism crippled German science, math, and
technology. If you remember your math courses, many things have German names.
You'll notice that's mainly pre-1933 works. The mathematical establishment at
Gottingten and elsewhere, which included many Jews and people married to them,
was eviscerated. Ditto for physics.

The only place they were unambiguously ahead of Allied technology was
rocketry. Our bombers were superior, Soviet tanks were superior to what the
Germans had, and the fighters were comparable. Even with rocketry, the allies
would have caught up even without Operation Paperclip.

Nazism really doesn't have any upsides.

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redwood
I don't mean to describe this as an "upside" but one of the key aspects of
fascism is the unification of business elites and the government which can
lead to very fast industrial advancements at the expense of many other things
that are certainly far more important

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RachelF
Interesting that the V-2 project cost $2 billion. This is around the same as
the Manhattan project, and 1 billion less than the B-29 programme.

The V-2 was ludicrously expensive, especially compared to the V-1 which the
RAF estimated cost around 120 pounds (~$500) each.

The V-2 project probably hastened Germany's defeat by consuming high tech
components like turbines and electronics that could have been better used in
aircraft.

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rixed
It might just be a widely held misunderstanding that the V2's purpose was only
meant as a ballistic missile. But if I remember correctly it was also, and
probably initially mostly, meant as a psychological and political weapon, the
objective being to convince British population of the necessity to reach a
separate agreement with Germany, so they could end the war on that front
before moving against the Soviet Union. Therefore the best weapon had to be
frightening but not necessarily very efficient from a deaths per invested
dollars measurement.

The response from the British state is also to be understood as a political
move: they responded with the large bombimg raids over German cities (using
plain old death-toll effective bombers), thus signifying that there would be
no separate peace agreement with the UK.

According to this narrative, it sounds like the German war plan was naive to
believe other great powers would agree to let Germany conquer Russia, more
than naive regarding the efficiency of the V2 as a weapon.

Anyway, just a reminder that ultimately it's all about politics not
technology.

A good source I can remember about the V2 story during the war, from the UK
point of view, was this book:

Most secret war, by R.V. Jones

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RachelF
There's a BBC TV series that R.V. Jones helped make. Here's the episode on the
V-2 - well worth watching
[https://youtu.be/fkCW4g8It_A](https://youtu.be/fkCW4g8It_A)

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FrojoS
Website crashes on iPhone. Anyone has an alternative link, eg pastebin please?

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Xylakant
Works for me in FF on iPhone, but stalls a bit when loading.

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davidgould
The best book on the V-2 is still Pynchon's _Gravitys Rainbow._

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jcelerier
no giscardpunk -> no funk

