On Sun, May 12, 2019 at 10:08 Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
On Sun, 12 May 2019, Ken wrote:
...Very quaint but informative. Good thing they had an insane leader or
we would be speaking German or be a lamp shade.
In fairness, the V-2 was a product of the insanity: Germany spent nearly
as much on it as the US spent on the Manhattan Project, and the V-2's
military value was zero. The same amount of money and effort spent on
almost anything else -- e.g., faster development and higher production
volume of the much-cheaper V-1 -- would have accomplished much more.
One consequence of the political insanity was that Nazi Germany had no
systematic process for deciding whether a new idea was worth pursuing.
If you could catch the attention of somebody big -- ideally Hitler -- you
were golden even if your idea was garbage, and there was way too much of
that. Any unbiased analysis of the V-2 would have concluded quickly that
it should not proceed unless there were immediate prospects of either a
much more accurate guidance system or a warhead much more lethal than high
explosive.
The Allies had some of this too, but on a much smaller scale and so it
didn't do major damage.
(And before concluding that we've left all that behind us, consider how
much money is spent now on "black" projects, and how little independent
scrutiny most of them probably get...)
Henry
