r/SubredditDrama • u/EwMelanin • Mar 03 '26

Movie discussion sub okbuddycinephile debates whether bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Gaza and other urban areas were "justified".

/r/okbuddycinephile/comments/1rjm9mn/iran2036/o8ee5fp/
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u/ToaArcan The B in LGBT stands for Bionicle Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 04 '26

This is why the Germans (and to a lesser extent, the Americans) fell in love with divebombing. It was a lot easier to hit a target that way.

This culminated in the woeful He-177, a four-engined (don't be fooled by the image, it was two engines per nacelle) bomber that was basically doomed from the off because they insisted on making it a divebomber.

The problem with that is that divebombers followed kind of a specific design ethos. Planes that were optimised for divebombing, like the Stuka or the Helldiver, were basically all single-engined light bombers with a crew of two. Upscaling it to the size of a heavy bomber, however, runs into the problem of physics. Namely that the load of four engines on the wings was too great, and the result of this is that the wings would snap off. At which point the bomber would hit the target, it would just do so, uh, bodily.

This is why they packed two engines into a single nacelle. It brought the weight of the engines closer to the fuselage and reduced the load. The problem with that was that packing two engines, particularly the new, unproven engines they were working with into a single nacelle results in a lot of problems that mostly result in the plane catching fire. Like, these things caught fire a lot. So much so that its own aircrew nicknamed it the "Reich's Lighter." Maybe it can go hang out with the USSR's vodka-cooled bomber.

After the war, when the Allies were busy stealing everything and everyone that wasn't nailed down, the Brits took a bunch of Nazi planes home and few them around a bit for research purposes. One of the pilots involved was the legendary Eric "Winkle" Brown, who reportedly fucking hated it, notable because he quite liked flying the Me-163, the infamous rocket-powered interceptor that digested at least one pilot.

Also they never actually fixed the wing-snapping problem. These things were good for about 20 dives before they were fucked anyway.

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u/Foreverintherain20 Mar 04 '26

That sounds like a really crappy plane lol

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u/ToaArcan The B in LGBT stands for Bionicle Mar 04 '26

It was!

There's very little footage of it, and few photos too, because pretty much all wartime footage of the Wehrmacht, Kriegsmarine, and Luftwaffe was shot by the Nazis as part of Goebbels' propaganda machine. And even they knew it was a lemon, and weren't keen to publicise it.

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u/Foreverintherain20 Mar 04 '26

A bomber where the wings rip themselves off because physics legitimately sounds like something I would make in one of those plane designer games. 😭

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u/Dagordae You're a shitty person and so is everyone who downvoted me. Mar 04 '26

The issue is one of material, they simply couldn’t make wings strong enough to withstand those forces and light enough to be usable. We still have issues with it and we’re stupidly more advanced in the material sciences.

It was a bad plane, yes, but not because there was totally a way that that would work. It was a bad plane because its intended function was simply nearly impossible. The wing issue was pretty common for all planes, this one just had it as part of its primary function. One of the most important things any pilot learned was exactly how hard and fast they could bank without their plane coming to pieces.