"Insanely Advanced Pieces Of Nazi Wartime Equipment" Topic

"…That said, the Nazis did give the world some of its most hilariously badass and awesome inventions of war. Since they basically gave scientists free reign to do whatever they wanted in the name of invent new ways to kill people, we've been blessed with things like …"
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Amicalement
Armand

They left out the Ark of the Covenant and the Spear of Destiny.

Wolfhag

Nazis

Say what you will, but has there ever been a better army of bad guys?

Imperial Romans?

Say what you will, but has there ever been a better army of bad guys

Yes. Its old out-dated claptrap from a very badly informed Twitter expert.
This (for example) is complete :

The Zielgerät 1229, also known as the Vampir Scope, was a revolutionary night vision attachment, designed to be fitted to the Nazis' equally-as-revolutionary STG44 assault rifle. This basically gave soldiers equipped with the system the ability to see in the dark. Please note, again, that the Nazis had all of this stuff during a time when stabbing a guy with a knife fastened to your gun was still considered high-tech.

As the only successful use of IR gunsights in WW2 was by the US in the Pacific-I presume the US IR equipment did not stop them fastening a sharp piece of flint to the end of their gun?

Can someone remind me of the Nazi equivalent of the B29?

Or the Avro Lancaster for that matter.

A 4-engined bomber with an atomic bomb payload could have been a war winner in 1943/44.

A night sight for a rifle? Not so much.

(smile)

Amicalement
Armand

The Germans were not somehow unique in the development of random and unusual tools of death. The difference seems to be the odd convergence of selective recall from opposing camps: wehraboos who are driven to highlight every conceivable success as clear evidence of superior German cleverness, and we-be-better-than-them types who are fascinated by every hairbrained or evil idea the Germans ever had.

Let us not forget the collections of of the hairbrained, odd, experimental, and even silly ideas that the Allies tried, not to mention the very successful technologies of death that carried forward into the post-war era.

For the Soviets we have anti-tank dogs, or the ampulomet bottle-thrower as hair-brained ideas, and monstrosities like the SU-152 / ISU-152 that actually turned out to be effective weapons.

The Brits had their own Bates Eight-Barrel Bottle Thrower (as an answer to the Ampulomet's most notable weakness, being that the bottles burst upon firing only some fraction of the time, and the Brits wanted to maximize the likelyhood of the gun's crew getting the full impact of their own weapon). And what accounting of insane ideas could leave out the Great Panjandrum? But if you want actual hair-brained ideas that worked, affected the war, and continued working in military use after the war, one need look no further than Asdic.

For the US, well if you want bat-sh!t crazy ways to kill people, how about dropping little baskets with rabid bats on cities instead of bombs? Or using pigeons as the guidance mechanisms in anti-shipping air weapons? And if you want stuff that was out-there, but worked and continued to work for militaries since, well in addition to the B-29s and A-bombs mentioned above, we also have high-octane aviation gas, and proximity-fuzed artillery shells … and in all cases the lists go on and on.

Yeah, I'll give the Germans the baddest uniforms, and the baddest march-in-parade-formation, but in terms of hair-brained ways to kill people that didn't or did work, they have nothing unique over anyone else.

-Mark
(aka: Mk 1)

My dad trained with sticky bombs.
Very briefly.
They thought it must have been invented by a german spy.
This is a glass ball full of nitro glycerine on a stick.
With a coating of some jncredibly sticky stuff and a timed fuse.
Once it stuck, it wasn't going to come off anything you stuck it to.
Especially if it was material like your greatcoat, sleeve or pack.
A really unstable grenade that was quite likely to stick to the thrower after they pull the pin.
They said no thanks.

The boys atr was unpopular but they just quietly "lost" each replacement.

I wonder why pics like this get overlooked in all the Luftwaffe 1946 insanity…………..[URL=https://imageshack.com/i/po0rVGoXj]

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Recently saw pictures of a British tank fitted with IR binoculars for the TC and Driver and a batch of extra IR lights on the front of the tank. The caption was the equipment was use to help guide troops into position in the dark in preparation for an attack (1945).

For all their out-of-the-box thinking and scientific wizardry, the Nazi armed forces lacked simple but effective force multipliers that proved far more useful in waging war than absurdly-heavy tanks or niche equipment. How would Kursk have gone with flail tanks? Long-range heavy bombers might have given Soviet factories rather more problems than they did face. Even a standard rifle with more than five rounds in the magazine would probably have been more useful thanIR night sights or rocket propulsion!

Even a standard rifle with more than five rounds in the magazine would probably have been more useful than IR night sights or rocket propulsion!

That would be the MP43/MP44/StG44 – by the time it was issued in any numbers (2nd half of 1944) it was too late to make much of a difference. It was advanced for its time – one American veterans' account referred to it as 'a Buck Rogers weapon'.

Also, most of the production was sent to Volksgrenadier divisions. While it no doubt increased their staying power on the defence, it did leave the actual counter attack forces – PzD, PzGrD etc relying on the old methods.

Let us not forget the collections of of the hairbrained, odd, experimental, and even silly ideas that the Allies tried

To be fair, until you try you don't know. Also real science isn't the movies, where if a prototype fails once it gets pulled. Obviously somebody should have stopped the lunatics trying to skip a bomb along a lake like it was a stone, or a tank that laid its own road, or a wooden framed ground attack aircraft, or dolls to mimic paratroopers, or having the arrogance to think that a machine could be invented to break unbreakable codes.

Someone should have stopped all that.

I still don't think they had help from aliens, including having their own Flying Saucer …

But I could be wrong …

+1 @Last Hussar

I was thoroughly disgusted reading about these characters:

Manhattan Project Spies

…the "knowledge transfer" allowed the Soviets to advance their Atomic bomb project by very many years – chiefly by steering them away from unproductive theories and approaches.