That whole design, as a bomber, makes me an unhappy camper. But there are things you CAN do.

-Accept the escape route limits as you optimize the bomber for night operations.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/...

The key to survival is to make the escape routes as short as possible. This based on what I see requires a radical rethink of how that bird was laid out.

a. The canopy is the logical bailout route for the pilot (ejector seat straight UP.)

b. As radio man and flight engineer are sitting in a death box right behind the pilot and on top of the no-escape route bomb-bay, their only quick way out is to fare that canopy back in the redesign  and shove them in with the pilot under a longer glass house (two more ejector seats straight UP.)

c. The bomb-aimer is in the nose below the forward nose turret. Since that turret is a scheduled deletion for a glass house pointed nose faring to reduce drag, he gets a seat (more room for him and the bombsight with no turret, the more comfortable position also makes his job far easier) and a cleared bailout route: so out he goes straight DOWN. (Ejector seat of course.)

d1. The poor rear gunner is stuck all alone in his little turret with a bulkhead (and a damned toilet!*1) between him and the side entry exit door at the back of the plane. The whole tail design demands a rethink. How about we put him in a seat with a gunner's sight and slave that tail turret's guns to his sight? Who says the fire director and aimer (him) has to be coincident with the guns? Rip the toilet out and give him an escape path DOWN where it is. He has to make do without an ejector seat as we have weight to worry about. Still has that bulkhead to crawl through. Nothing we can do about that with this solution.

d2. Or we can stick the rear gunner behind the flight engineer and fare that guy into the spinal glass house canopy with the pilot and radio-operator (co-pilot, since I would put [rudimentary] flight controls in the number two position-REDUNDANCY always in case the primary position and pilot fails) . Stick the dorsal guns there at the rear of the glass house canopy as well. And of course he gets an ejector seat. The rear guns are slaved to that gunner position so that the rear guns track what the rear gunner sees. He didn't see anything most of the time anyway, so who cares if it works? Crew morale is an HFE factor

About crew moral and those popguns. If the Browning .303s were anything like the US model ANM-2's then those damned things gave off a muzzle flash you could see a mile away in the dark. You don't want to do that with a nacht jager wild boar looking for you in the dark over Bremen. A simple thing like a flash-hider never occurred to anyone?

Congratulations, you just designed the B-47!

The RAF high command does not come off too well, I'm afraid.

Reiterated.

(next post)

OBNW  wrote.
Bad decisions are made during war especially when you have to make it up as you go along, Harris was too wedded to the doctrine he was trained in "the bomber will win the next war" (strangely how this is STILL thought of as valid) , Don't forget the RAF considered high altitude fast daylight raids, but after trying it with the only suitable aircraft (the B17) came to the conclusion that it was suicide

EXACTLY . Professional air force. They listened and learned from their own (peacetime) experience and the RAF's.(wartime). I just wish they had listened to each other a lot more. Barnes Wallis was light-years ahead on bomb design. Generally the British did a better job with bomb design. Americans designed better bomb aids in the plane but even they could have taken lessons from captured (German) technology. You cannot sausage slice a system. You have to know how all of the parts work.

*1 What are you going to do for those poor fellows when they have to crap and pee? Ten hour missions were normal for those crews. A toilet is necessary?

-Diet, learn what food produces the necessary calories and produces the least bowel movements. Then issue crap-pots or diapers and/or stool absorption paper. This is not something you can ignore in HFE. We have modern aircrews strapped in for eighteen hour missions in FIGHTERS. B-17s did NOT have toilets. The crews learned to adapt with impromptu solutions.

-Pee-bottles for urine.

-Snackfood and something to keep the crews hydrated. Did you know prolonged oxygen use dries you out? Keep that up long enough and there are NASTY side effects. (Cramps and dry-lung being two instant loss of mission killers.

B.

 

 

 

Leaving Shooter's bad English in place because I think it reflects his careless approach to how he writes about the subject...

Given that I've posted a source that shows the PHOTOGRAPHIC RESULTS of RAF nighttime bomb-walking into point targets were successful on a score of occasions, I would say that stupid statement was exactly that: stupid.

OBNW wrote:I was reading up on the B17 afters shooters complete bull and found that the orginial USAAF tactics called for altitudes of about 20000ft as beyond that the bomb sights were useless, the RAF tried them at 30-35000 feet trying to get above the flak and fighters, they failed, they also found that the B17 was seriuosly under protected even by RAF standards, this feed back mean that by the time the USAAF entered the war vast improvements on the B17 defensive front had been made

I've posted test results of the B-29 dropping tallboys, using the Norden bomb-sight from 15,000 feet and 10,000 feet. They missed over and short by 150 feet on average. They missed left or right by an average of 600 to 1000 feet or more. (See above what I posted about left right drift error physics as applied to bomb drop.) So that statement Shooter made is non-factual, i.e. is easily refuted as stupid.

2. All aircraft got better as the war continued.

Gee you would think so, captain obvious?

3. At least in day light you could see them coming and had a chance to shoot back.
   

They could see you, too, and shot four thousand of your planes down. That is an obvious hint, that you are not doing something right. But then Stuart misses subtle clues like that one.

 

Smaller bomber payloads per sortie (note the way the word is spelled?) means more bombers needed to drop the same bomb tonnages (2 US heavy bombers for every; 1 British, do the MATH). You could say the USAAF bombing campaign was inefficient on a per sortie basis, just from the additional exposure risk of more men and machines to enemy fire to drop those roughly equivalent tonnages. Target rich environment of slow speed non-maneuverable low-payload bomber targets all packed together with each bomber crammed full with ten to eleven men, makes for a HAPPY Luftwaffe.

[next post]

A twin-engine American aluminum skinned version of the Mosquito (5,000+ of them on hand, estimated 23,000 production  run-roughly equal to the the material resources wasted, used to create the B-17 force by the way. ^1) with attendant fighter (3000+) escort to keep Galland's boys snarled up means a different kind of bombing campaign and a very UNHAPPY Luftwaffe.

-For one thing those raids would be low level dash raids (RADAR horizon?) with ACCURATE lay-downs of bombs (the closer to the ground the less drift error.). And since the numbers would be there, the defense would be swamped by TWICE the number of aircraft dropping TWICE as many bombs (tonnages and numbers) with one half to one third as many men risked. You might actually see daylight precision bombing work the way it was intended. Losses to FLAK would be horrendous, but what the hell. 13,000 DEAD and 11,000 prisoners is better than 26,000 DEAD and 24,000 prisoners.

About night bombing...

Given that LeMay, our best bomber tactician, also adopted night bombing at medium to low altitude and did better with it than WW II USAAF daylight tactics, the obvious conclusion is that he was an idiot? Right?

In Shooter's world BACKWARDS to what facts show is logical; that is the way things work to his way of thinking.

B.

^1 Work the numbers.

 

one 12 tonne bomber with 2 radial engines and 3 crewmen.

vs one 27 tonne bomber with 4 radial engines and 10 crewmen

to deliver four to three tonnes of bombs at a combat radius of 1500-2000 kilometers

 

With the 10,000 B-17s flung at Germany

270,000 tons of materials.

Same bomb-load 1.3 m tonnes

100,000+ men at risk over the campaign duration

 

Now 23,000 of the "Yellow Jackets"

276,000  tons of materials.

twice the bombload 2.5 m tonnes

69,000 men at risk.

 

But here is the kicker. Half the engines means half the mechanics per plane or TWICE as many planes per mechanic pool. Fewer and smaller aircrew personnel means fewer potential casualties per bomb dropped.

 

But here is the bonus.

 

Saturation. Double the dash bombers means no shortage for the Eighth when they needed numbers to swamp the German day fighter defense. Schweinfurt and Regensburg simultaneous becomes doable. German day fighters could swarm one of the two raids. Not both. There were never more than 500-600 of the bastards able to mass at one place.

 

And with a proper P-38 force to interfere? Impossible.

 

Hindsight 20/20.

 

B.

 

 

Except for those missions when the 1500 mile range was 1000 miles to short.
The B-17 had a EEW of less than 36,500 pounds, or 18.25 tons, times your 10,000 planes is only 182,500 tons.
  What was the total bomb tonage dropped by Mossys during the war and how many sorties did the bomber variants fly?
 23,000 of the "Yellow Jackets"


If you think that only engine mechs are required to keep any plane flying, you are soorly mistaken! 23,000 planes means 23,000 control systems, hydraulic systems, Instrament systems and avionic systems. Note that the "Advanced" avionics were the number one cause of grounds planes late war. Because of GEE's ability to guide planes home over England, it's operational readiness was required for take off!
  Provided you can train twice as many crews.
  That makes it easy to say they made so many stupid choices back then, but...
 

    Given that the RAF BC claimed post war that less than half of their bombs "Hit the targets" ie, cities! Occaisional instances of luck in hitting a few targets does not make up for the other >50% than missed the entire city they were aiming at.

 

1. The Norden bomb sight was not useless above 20,000'. In fact it was used with out modification at altitudes over twice that height from the B-36. 

 

Shooter, without checking his facts and logic, wrote:

Given the absolute fact that the USAAF flew more sories, 762,462, dropped more bombs, 1,396,816 tons,

 

 and had fewer casualties than the RAF BC, see above, I would have to say the entire strategy was flawed at best and totaly screwed at worst. 

 

 

Your logic makes good sence on it's face but fails utterly if you factor in the RAF's claim post war that "Less than half the bombs hit the target! IE, landed inside the city limits. So if you look at the number of RAF-BC casualties-Vs- the bomb tonnage that actually hit anything it changes the results dramatically!

 

 

The USAAF reaction was quite quick. Some of the changes you see from the B-17F to G were as a result of the fighter massacre. Some were faster belly turret traverse, nose guns in a powered mount, bomb fuses reworked so that they didn't go off when shells hit the bomb bay, etc,. 

 

I believe the only change between the F and G was the nose turret Boeing didnt even change the model number 

 

What did I say about heat sensors? This is where the MONICA comes in. Once you get a positive, the heat sensor can automatically turn on the gun radar to determine what the bearing threat is. You know that something is beneath you, that is hot enough to be a machine. Voila, the radio-echo ranging sensor comes on and a guns solution track begins. The radar directed gun shoots, automatically as soon as a positive return registers. This was a possible even with the crude tech of 1944.

 

 

Then there is always PAINT. It always struck me how insane the British aircraft paint schemes were. The Germans aloft could pick a Lancaster out by the way moonlight reflected off the beasts! Matte works as does dark GRAY. The  bomb bay (B-17 and B-24 favorite routes are impossible). Note how the main wing splits the plane in two? Then the tailplane does the same thing? How the bomb bay interrupts the cockpit escape route down ( cockpit escape was suposed to be up thought the canopy escape hatch