What if: Nazi ufos

[madd0ct0r]

well, the tactic did work for the stuka...

For this reason, dive bombing was the only method of providing the accuracy needed to attack high-value point targets like bridges and ships. They were a common feature of most naval air services, and many land-based air forces as well.

On the negative side, optimizing an aircraft for near-vertical dives came at the expense of performance. In addition, a dive bomber was highly vulnerable to ground fire as it dived towards its target. Dive brakes were employed on many designs. These created drag which slowed the aircraft somewhat in order to increase accuracy and to prevent speeds which could damage the structures of the plane. These were almost exclusive to dive bombers, though the air brakes fitted to modern aircraft are often of a similar design.

[Simon_Jester]

A lot of Stukas got shot down doing that, though. The Stuka was a single-engine aircraft, and not a very heavy one. Under total war conditions something like that is cheap and replaceable. Which was fine. The Germans could afford to make lots of them, and trading a few Stukas for an enemy railroad bridge was a very good deal.

These UFOs are far more valuable and cannot be produced in comparable numbers.

Plus, their flying characteristics may not make them suitable for pulling out of a steep dive at the bottom of the run, but that's a detail I can't really speak to.


Put it this way: the most effective dive bomber designs dated to the 1930s. By mid-war, planes like the Stuka were increasingly obsolete, but they were not replaced by and large- or if they were, they were replaced by fighter-bombers that attacked by low altitude level bombing instead of dive bombing.

By 1945 dive bombing was very very risky because of the invention of radar proximity fuzes- the US at least was turning out AA gun ammunition that would explode if it even came near an enemy aircraft, which made flying straight into the teeth of the enemy guns from above a very bad move. Meanwhile, advances in bombsight technology were making dive bombing less useful.

[Sky Captain]

Level bombing were not particulary accurate because aircraft was moving. If the ufo can come to a total stop and hover at altitude above AA gun range then it could maneuver exactly over the target and release the bomb when it is properly aimed. Make those bombs aerodynamic to fall faster and only inacuraccies would arise from wind and slight imperfections in bomb construction. Or use wire guidance to aim exactly where required.

[Purple]

Or just drop a whole lot of them and level the whole area under the aircraft. The thing can carry 10 B-17's worth of bombs. Given a rather focused drop area due to hovering it could do some quite fun things down bellow.

[Scottish Ninja]

Yeah, I'm thinking about the damage these things could do dropping German equivalents of the Grand Slam from 50-60 thousand feet. Of course, the question is what targets the Germans would choose as deserving of such a treatment; Manhattan might prove to be a tempting target once the US enters the war, though I'm not sure what the best targets might be in Britain and Russia - perhaps ports and shipyards in the former case.

[Sea Skimmer]

IIRC there are man portable wire guided anti tank missiles with a range of a few km and wire guided torpedoes with something like 20 - 30 km range so a bulky wire guided bomb with 15 km range (to be truly immune against fighters and AA fire) should also be possible.

The Germans in fact more or less attempted to do this in WW2. After the Allies began jamming the crap out of Hs293 and Fritz X radio controlled bombs they introduced wire guided versions. They worked like crap because the wires broke too easily. Wires on anti tank missiles also break like crazy if you fire them from anything but a stationary launcher aimed at a slow moving target; while the speeds involved with wire guided torpedoes are much lower than anything aircraft and the water acts to support the wire along its entire length to a degree. The radio controlled bombs did work fairly well though, and might be effective until jammed. Its unlikely that a jam resistant data link could be produced in a WW2 time frame; nor did anyone have such a bomb in operational state before late 1942.

Best thing to do with such a limited supply of UFOs and limited payload apiece, not to mention the long mission cycle times required to make 400kph trips to the US and depths of the USSR would probably be to bomb power plants and oil refineries. Power plants and transport are the two things all war industry depended on, oil is part of transport. Industrial production facilities themselves are too numerous and dispersed for a low payload strategic bombing offensive to be effective. The same is true of the non fuel side of transport; though destroying the very most important railroad bridges and tunnels might be worthwhile if it can be done with acceptable accuracy. People did some crazy repairs to WW2 rail bridges though; even massive damage may be given improvised repaired in a few weeks. But then, the Germans also got pretty crazy with repairing oil facilities.

Steep dive bombing is a bad idea, automatic weapons cut them to pieces. I doubt hovering bombing will work either, because an ability to precisely hover in a cross wind is not specified and even with spotting bombs released you aren't likely to have an awesome CEP from a ceiling safe from anti aircraft fire. If you go stationary you are a far easier target, so effective ceiling would now be the same as maximum ceiling. For a British 3.7in gun that was already something like IIRC 40-45,000 feet. 1,000 feet CEP might be possible on good days.

Best strategy seems like an attack in pairs at night. One UFO acts as a flareship and illuminates the target on demand, while another one quickly drops to an altitude of around 12,000 feet and approaches the target while using its vertical climb ability to rapidly change altitude in several thousand foot increments. This will make heavy AA fire even with VT fuses almost entirely ineffective, because the predictors wont be able to track the target moving around so radically. Meanwhile the UFO is still above the effective ceiling of automatic weapons. When the target is really close the UFO drops fairly low, maybe six thousand feet and releases its bombs with excellent accuracy, then speeds away using the same strategy climbing in bursts. Automatic weapons fire would be some threat on this low part of the trip, but the US and UK and USSR would have vast numbers of lightly defended point targets particularly in terms of automatic weapons.

Zooming straight down onto the target would work, but I suspect this would lead to non ignorable losses as you drop down into or climb up into barrage fire. Of course, mixing up tactics would be important, so almost all tactics would have some use. With such low production rates even a very low loss rate will hurt badly. Best bet is breaking the moral of the western allies. Also its worth remembering that lots of UFO missions will have to be expended on recon flights to have any real clue as to the location of industry in the US and USSR. The UK could be covered by conventional aircraft.

[MrDakka]

Best strategy seems like an attack in pairs at night.

Anyone know how prevalent Allied night fighters were? And how effective were they and their radar equipment?

[JointStrikeFighter]

It won't matter; the rate of climb/decent will effortlessly make attack by fighters impossible.

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah. If you can just arbitrarily decide to start flying straight up at anything more than sixty miles an hour or so, most planes of the era aren't going to stand a real chance of engaging you. Come to think of it, would you arm a craft like this with AA weapons, or rely purely on mobility for defense? You don't want to mix it up with enemy fighters, really, that's asking for trouble and bullets. On the other hand if a fighter happens to be in position to attack you and for whatever reason you can't dodge perfectly (engine failure?), you want an ace in the hole.

Practical questions... hm.

The really interesting one is, would the British, Soviets, US, or for that matter Japanese or Italians use these things differently? How would a different national situation impact the use of a basically similar vehicle?

[Sea Skimmer]

Anyone know how prevalent Allied night fighters were? And how effective were they and their radar equipment?

First ones had radar in late 1940 and they later had much better radar than the Nazis ever did. US used A-20s and P-38s along with British aircraft prior to the P-61, British used Beaufighters and Mosquitoes late war, lots of stuff early war. All of them would be much prevalent if they had a expanded threat to face. The Russians had the Pe-3 and several others but never produced much because of a near complete lack of meaningful night threat. Unlimited UFO range/ceiling would be troublesome, since they can approach a target from any direction and at altitudes above what WW2 radar can see. So they'd just appear out of nowhere and night fighters wouldn't have much chance of interception.

Defensive weapons at night aren't worth that much though a single tail turret might be worthwhile. The British found tail gunners were far more useful as lookouts than at shooting down fighters. Having .303 machine guns didn't help though. Each major powered turret mounted is going to cost 1500-2000lb of weight which means less bomb load. Depending on the shape of the UFO, it might work better to only have observer positions and just mount more armor on vital areas. If you get stuck at an altitude you can be engaged at by enemy fighters, the thing is just going to be in deep crap. Its even slower than a Lancaster or B-17, and if we assume engine damage prevents a climb then logically its straight line speed would also be reduced. Escape at 200mph is unlikely.

The allies might in fact find such craft most useful for recon work. For that matter the Nazis would have to expend large numbers of sorties for recon if they want to bomb the depths of the USSR or US to find all the new factories and stuff that they only know the general 'this city' location of. That's a big deal in WW2 when you just didn't have accurate target maps, you had to make them as you went along. The UK and Germans had covertly spied on each other with hidden cameras in aircraft prewar, but that was limited.

[someone_else]

It is questionable whether a twenty ton payload allows sufficient jamming for a relatively limited number of craft.

Not an expert, but assuming jamming equipment is not so different from a fully-fledged radar (since it is basically an antenna broadcasting a signal to overcome the enemy's radars), these things have a 200 km radius and weight far less than 20 tons (I'd say at most 5 tons). Yeah, you would need a generator to power it, but that's another 5 tons or so. Still 10 tons for other stuff.

assuming a 30-vessel fleet (8 months of ufo production) you can fuck all radars in a line 400*30 = 12'000 km long and 400 meters wide. It's around half of the UK's coastline (30-ish thousand km).

You can have all kinds of fucking weird antennas you want, since it can jam effectively the ground stations from up to low orbit, so even if they maneuver like a pregnant zombie whale nothing is going to shoot them down.

At least this was the general idea. I hope I'm not totally wrong.

Flying artillery platforms are at least credible; the problem is that the inherent limitations of aiming an artillery piece in three dimensions at ranges of several miles straight up plus several miles sideways is... impressive.

You don't need to aim up, you can aim it down as well. the math does not change, but the shell speed is better (it does not waste time raising altitude). For example, the AC 130's cannon is horizontal or even pointing down.

IF the things can hover well it's doable (otherwise they can fly circles around the target as AC 130 do).

Level bombing from aircraft is inaccurate partly because the plane is moving and has no time to correct its aim. Being able to hover directly over a target at fifty or sixty thousand feet considerably improves your accuracy.

bullshit, it's the same calculation as artillery fire, and they even had the main issue is wind, since the bombs don't fall very fast, even a not-so strong wind will push them off-target. The more time the bomb needs to get down the more the wind fucks you up. Guided bombs that don't totally suck are stuff they developed later into the war, so if they want to use them ASAP, flying artillery is the way to go.

The main difference is that an artillery platform can correct the aim before shooting the next volley and since the shell goes significantly faster there is less time for wind to fuck up the aim.

It won't matter; the rate of climb/decent will effortlessly make attack by fighters impossible.

Your pilots will hate you, and will call the ufo crafts "vomit comet" in german.

You need to place on them a short-range radar, otherwise any fucker can ambush them at night/from a cloud/ from behind the sun, whatever and you're screwed.

[PainRack]

The Foo fighters were supposed to be able to interfere with Allied fighters engines and radio communications, so, that's a powerful defensive and even offensive weapon on its own.

[Sidewinder]

I have to ask: Are the Nazi UFOs something the Allies can reverse-engineer, if pilot error or mechanical failure caused one to crash on Allied-held territory? (You have to assume you'll suffer losses to such incidents- no human is perfect, nor any machine.) Or is it something only the Nazis have the ability to manufacture, in which case, there exist production bottlenecks the Allies or resistance groups can exploit?

How about maintenance? Do the UFOs run on petroleum products, or some exotic materials that are difficult to procure in that era, e.g., enriched uranium or plutonium? If so, there's another production bottleneck the Allies or resistance groups can exploit, to make the UFOs oversized paperweights.

[Darkevilme]

Simon's point about the structural volume probably does mean that larger saucers would be unfeasible if your goal was larger carrying capacity. And the justification for the 'larger=faster' rule other than 'it worked for x-com' is that there's a force exerted on the circular array components when the craft is under power. This force increases with speed and proximity to center of the vessel but is evenly distributed throughout all such array components. The larger the perimeter the less strain is inflicted on an individual component while at speed cause there's room for more of these components, and they're placed at the maximum distance away from the center where they can still function to further reduce stress. It does not increase with the weight to be propelled though so long as the main engine can handle said weight.

The craft do not have a 'hover exactly above a point on the planet' function unless you can tell from several thousand feet up how the wind is blowing you around and compensate. If you put the engine in neutral the craft essentially acts like a disc shaped balloon.

and yes, the allies could reverse engineer a saucer. The saucers are reverse engineered from a mythological 'chariot of the gods' that was dug up by nazis. No they don't run on gasoline, they run on some more exotic fuel.

Reverse engineering a saucer is probably a better option for countering saucers than 'american rocket/jetplanes versus nazi saucers'. As awesome as that idea is and the fact that only jet or rocket aircraft would have enough rate of climb to keep up with saucers jet or rocket aircraft probably wouldnt be able to deal with the fact that saucers dont have a stall speed, and so can just loiter evasively at low speed and likely their attackers will never get enough time in an attack run to actually line up a shot.

[Sidewinder]

Reverse engineering a saucer is probably a better option for countering saucers than 'american rocket/jetplanes versus nazi saucers'. As awesome as that idea is and the fact that only jet or rocket aircraft would have enough rate of climb to keep up with saucers jet or rocket aircraft probably wouldnt be able to deal with the fact that saucers dont have a stall speed, and so can just loiter evasively at low speed and likely their attackers will never get enough time in an attack run to actually line up a shot.

What about air-to-air missiles? The Nazis were developing them during the war (see Ruhrstahl X-4), and with a threat like this, you bet the Allies will begin developing such weapons.

[Simon_Jester]

Those missiles sucked; air to air missiles weren't practical until 1950 or later.

Level bombing from aircraft is inaccurate partly because the plane is moving and has no time to correct its aim. Being able to hover directly over a target at fifty or sixty thousand feet considerably improves your accuracy.

bullshit, it's the same calculation as artillery fire, and they even had the main issue is wind, since the bombs don't fall very fast, even a not-so strong wind will push them off-target. The more time the bomb needs to get down the more the wind fucks you up. Guided bombs that don't totally suck are stuff they developed later into the war, so if they want to use them ASAP, flying artillery is the way to go.

Simple. Hover at sixty thousand feet. Drop a five hundred pound bomb. See where the "boom" happens. Move slightly to compensate. Drop next five hundred pound bomb. Repeat until you achieve an acceptable standard of accuracy.

Then, drop the big bomb.

It's really no different in principle from artillery spotting. And you can use projectiles much heavier than a practical airborne gun can fire.

It won't matter; the rate of climb/decent will effortlessly make attack by fighters impossible.

Your pilots will hate you, and will call the ufo crafts "vomit comet" in german.

I'd rather ride the "vomit comet" than ride the "giant colander that got shot full of bullets..."

Simon's point about the structural volume probably does mean that larger saucers would be unfeasible if your goal was larger carrying capacity. And the justification for the 'larger=faster' rule other than 'it worked for x-com' is that there's a force exerted on the circular array components when the craft is under power. This force increases with speed and proximity to center of the vessel but is evenly distributed throughout all such array components. The larger the perimeter the less strain is inflicted on an individual component while at speed cause there's room for more of these components, and they're placed at the maximum distance away from the center where they can still function to further reduce stress. It does not increase with the weight to be propelled though so long as the main engine can handle said weight.

The problem is, simply, that if the weight/thrust the drive can manage scales linearly with the diameter of the drive ring, while the weight of the craft scales (at least) with the square... the most efficient cargo UFO is actually pretty damn small- as small as practical given the need to fit the cargo and drive inside.

The craft do not have a 'hover exactly above a point on the planet' function unless you can tell from several thousand feet up how the wind is blowing you around and compensate. If you put the engine in neutral the craft essentially acts like a disc shaped balloon.

So watch the ground and adjust speed accordingly. Or use radio navigation beams, although that leaves you vulnerable to enemy ECM.

[Sidewinder]

The saucers are reverse engineered from a mythological 'chariot of the gods' that was dug up by nazis. No they don't run on gasoline, they run on some more exotic fuel.

How much fuel do the Nazis have in reserve? How much can they manufacture/refine/whatever per day? What are the raw materials, and what suppliers exist to provide them?

These aren't trivial issues. The Me-262 was one of the best fighters of WW2, but it an oversized lawn ornament most of the time, because there was insufficient fuel to send it on sorties. For a flying saucer with exotic fuels, I imagine the problem will be a magnitude greater- especially since, once the fuel is identified, the Allies and the resistance will attempt to sabotage it as vigorously as they sabotaged German efforts to build a nuclear bomb.

[Simon_Jester]

It depends on the nature of the fuel. Are we talking "complex methods of physics and chemistry to synthesize it?" Or are we talking "very strange magic stuff we found in a cave somewhere?"

[Sea Skimmer]

The Germans might have to slow down work a few U-boat pens or convert oil storage facilities earlier but they can surely harden the construction facility and fuel production. If the Germans had been serious about building a nuclear bomb nothing was stopping them from building a completely new heavy water plant somewhere secure in Germany. The US built several from scratch to support the Manhattan Project. That the Germans used an existing Norwegian plant just reflects the moderate level of lab work they actually engaged in. A working superweapon would be treated a bit more serious one would think. You don't see the V-1 or V-2 projects being halted by bombing or sabotage.

[Darkevilme]

It's not some magic fuel found in or near the crashed sky chariot or derived from some glowing cube. It's something they can synthesize. For the hell of it we'll choose something extant and mentioned here though as we're not that familiar with ww2 rare element industry, heavy water. The Ufos run on heavy water cells.

[madd0ct0r]

now i've got visions of foo's raiding the manhattan project...

[Simon_Jester]

Well then, that's easy enough.

Heavy water isn't actually hard to make, you see. It's a pretty easy separation compared to something like uranium enrichment. The Nazis will have no trouble producing heavy water for an important wartime project as long as they can keep their electrical grid running.

[Sky Captain]

It's not some magic fuel found in or near the crashed sky chariot or derived from some glowing cube. It's something they can synthesize. For the hell of it we'll choose something extant and mentioned here though as we're not that familiar with ww2 rare element industry, heavy water. The Ufos run on heavy water cells.

Then it is powered by some sort of fusion reactor. I guess such system also would be highly useful aboard German submarines and for general power generation. A sub that has performance comparable to 1950. - 1960. era nuclear sub would be very hard to hunt down with WWII era anti sub warfare technology.

[Irbis]

Let me point out, IMHO, using the UFOs agains allied bombing is a very poor idea for one simple reason. Yes, you could try to fly above maximum ceiling of escort, but from that high even trying to hit enemy bombers would be a huge challenge. Maneuverability matters not one bit - when you go against 600+ fighters of enemy escort someone will eventually hit you, and you'd need to produce really staggering loss ratio of UFOs to bombers to make the prospect sane endeavor, something not really possible with WW II tech. After all, if Komets and Schwalbes were shoot down by diving allied fighters, something half their speed will only realistically have its ceiling as defense.

Same issue also persists with using it as a bomber, night or otherwise. Allies had excellent gun platform with radar and remote turret capable of keeping such singular, slow wunderwaffen clear from allied skies below 12 km, at which point you have got just another V-2 - inaccurate and not dropping anywhere near enough to convince anyone to stop fighting.

No, if I were to use it I'd try to use it against allied logistics - its range and speed makes it excellent observational platform, especially over Atlantic Gap, area without allied planes or ships escorting convoys. Meaning, wolfpacks are now much more deadly (as the subs now don't have to fritter away combat patrols on the off chance convoy will show up) - they can be massed on the convoy's patch. You also don't have to rely on resupplying submarines so much - these things have enough onboard capacity to try to rearm U-Boots on the seas, by UFO hovering above sub and lowering supplies by crane, all while watching for enemy forces. More ammunition means inflicting larger losses, unlike real life U-boots that often ignored "unappealing" ships in good positions to conserve torpedoes.

You could also try to use such UFOs to sweep away allied anti-sub aircraft - duking it out with lone flying boat is completely different animal than engaging P-51s, after all. Allies would probably respond by making escorts much heavier, but ships can do little against UFOs and it would place additional stress on the whole logistics chain. I think trying to win Battle of Atlantic with these would be the only way for them to make any impact on the war, outside of maintaining some of them as "sabotagers in being" craft, used sporadically to drop airborne troops, not too often because UK/Russia's airspace is too well defended and UFO loss too costly, but often enough to tie a lot of enemy's resources down that way.

[LaCroix]

You could use them to indiscriminately bomb harbours, as well - the allied supply is mostly done by ship. Park it over the harbour above ceiling and drop a shit-ton of bombs. Harbours are big enough targets that you simply will hit something. Bonus points for hitting a tanker or an ammo freighter...

But even if you don't manage to sink ships, simply cratering the area beyond recognition every day keeps their supplies interrupted.