If It's Good on the Ground, We Must Make It Fly!

I have always love reading about military history, and the lethal one-upsmanship that drives the development of new technologies, or novel applications of existing technology. One of the most sharp examples of that is the development of the tank, a lumbering beast without much maneuverability or firepower but just enough of both to breach the static defenses of the Western Front during the Great War (see below). It stands to reason that the British, masters of the domain of the sea, essentially took a battleship and made it a land vehicle.

As a result, the fundamental land weapon of the time, the rifled firearm, was given the right size and muzzle velocity to treat the tank like a tin can on a shooting range.

So tanks developed thicker frontal armor, eventually some of the anti-tank guns were put on motorized chassis... it was a creeping, crawling development. Then, somebody had a great idea. "What if we take that glorified pellet gun and make it FLY?" Holy crap, all we can say for certain is that the man was German, which is unsurprising. We can speculate that he was an engineer. The purest form of this idea can be seen below in the form of the Henschel HS-129B3:A quote from Wikipedia "But for some reason the Luftwaffe decided to skip over this gun for the Hs 129, and install a gigantic 75 mm gun from the Panzer IV. A huge hydraulic system was used to damp the recoil of the gun, and an auto-loader system with twelve rounds was fitted in the large empty space behind the cockpit. The resulting system was able to knock out any tank in the world, but the weight slowed the already poor performance of the plane to barely flyable in this new Hs 129B-3 version."

"That's right, Mr. Henschel, my team doubled the next-size caliber gun, it could sink Gibraltar, and it barely flies, but the specs say it just has to get off the ground, so we're all set. AND it is in a dead tie for the P-38 Lightning as the coolest aircraft on the planet." The man who sold that one is a role model for all engineers.

I need to slow down for a bit, and continue this soon by showing what happens when the Americans get ahold of a really good idea and Supersize it...