Luft 46

Have you tried calling them? ;)

Seriously, that would take a lot more conjecture. You'd almost have to take the Tolkien road and build your own universe. Luft '46 is composed of taking the paper planes and extrapolating them into production and action. I've never heard of any German plans that far into the future whence to start.

Bill Banaszak, MFE

There were a few designs thay had actually flown, a few were partially built but not finished for lack of parts and a few had wood cut for the mockups.....then there's all that cocktail napkin stuff, I consider that Luft Fantasy.

partially

Fine example of one of the "few designs" actually flown is the Bell X-5, derived directly from the Messerschmidt P1101. Regards, Bob

On Hyperscale.com today, there's another example of this, referring to the Shinden and I quote:

"Thankfully the B-29 bomber crews never encountered this formidable combat interceptor with its x4 30mm cannons in the skies above Japan."

Well they didn't and the skies over Japan were clear of enemy aircraft because their pilots were dead. And for good reason - we were at war. Why not say: "Japanese pilots were lucky they didn't come across B-29's that would use their formidable array of remote-controlled .50 Cal. machine guns to shoot them down in the skies above Japan."? Because reality is boring and uberweapons look cool... Comments like this in reviews do nothing to add to the historical accuracy of the aircraft - they lessen it. We don't know how the Shinden would have performed in combat but we're led to believe it would have been 'formidable'? There's Luft Fantasy and then there's Luft Embellishment... If I see one more, hour-long History Channel show about the special weapons

*both* sides were developing, complete with CGI encounters of flaming B-29's, I'm gonna puke. 58 minutes of praise for valiant, cutting edge designs and two minutes of "what-if" conjecture. Puh-leeze. Same thing goes for subjective, revisionist or "I wish the enemy won" kit reviews. How does the kit go together? That's what I want to know. Just the facts, Ma'm... I'd rather they make a program on designs gleaned from the vanquished for use on the victor's new generation of aircraft. *THAT* would be a better fit for the 'History Channel'.

Frank Kranick (who's in a mood today...)

Another was Argentina's Pulqui II, a follow-on to the Ta 183. Also, consider the Soviet I-250, also Aircraft Zh, which is a pretty straightforward copy of the Me 263. Most of the tech transfer, though, seems to be in detail design, like the wings and podded engines of the B-47, or the forward-fuselage-mounted jets on the XB-51.

Mark Schynert