People like to speculate on unlikely scenarios if everything had gone perfectly for the Nazis and their experiments had paid off - "What if they'd made the first guided missile submarine? What if they'd fielded the first jet fighter air force?"
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The classic LucasArts flight sim Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe was based on the latter scenario (and the Star Wars game TIE Fighter loosely based on that), this movie fantasy of an ultimate strike bomber letting one Knight of the Air win the war by himself
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It leaves a bad taste in my mouth having been a fan of that stuff as a kid But I mean you don't have to worry, Göring was too stupid not to get anyone who would've been competent enough to volunteer for such a role pointlessly killed (which is the plot of TIE Fighter)
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And, like There were ideas that Hitler latched onto that seem like he was looking into the future, like a jet-powered strike bomber There were ones that seem "ambitious but tragically flawed", like the idea of the Tiger "supertank" And some were just completely fucking dumb
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Up until the end of the war he kept pushing them to test the idea of a "rifle that shoots around corners" Literally putting a bent barrel on the thing and a periscope so you could see around a corner and shoot someone before they see you The ultimate trump card in urban warfare
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They *kept on trying to do this* and reporting back to him that because of the basic way a gun works the steepest angle you can bend the barrel is about 20 degrees before the gun blows up in your hand and you can't possibly aim to hit anything that way
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And like You don't need to be a physicist or a combat engineer to know that I could've told you that It's an obviously absurd idea, it's a joke from a Looney Tunes cartoon
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Anyone who'd served as a rifleman in urban combat (Hitler hadn't, he'd been a courier) could tell you that even if you had a gun that could magically shoot sideways aiming at a target around a corner with a mirror was a ridiculous, impossible idea
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That's what the whole thing was like He was just throwing out ideas to see what stuck, *while actively trying to win a war* The Pointy-Haired Boss "No such thing as a bad idea, as long as they're my ideas" ethos
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A bit like Trump demanding Dr Birx respond to an active pandemic by trying out random ideas based on obscure studies from 20 years ago that he himself does not understand that someone sent him in an email forward ("UV antiviral therapy", passing your blood under a light)
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This predictable thing where they want to win the war - whether a literal war or a metaphorical war against a disease - with some heroic cinematic magic bullet After chasing away anyone who might have any hope of actually doing such a thing for threatening their ego
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This inability to grasp that when everything is going well, a company can survive an ignorant blundering CEO making demands like "More gold leaf! More chandeliers!" but in an actual life-or-death wartime situation every moment spent entertaining stupid bullshit courts disaster
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