I think the German Gigant has already been mentioned. Like the BV 141, the Goblin, and a few others in this thread, it gets an entry in The World’s Worst Aircraft.
The original idea was attaching big glider wings, and a tail to a tank. The tank could be towed to altitude, glide to the drop site, and jettison the glider parts. Aerodynamic problems led to more and more of the tank being covered by a glider frame. Soon, they had a huge glider, still cloth skin stretched over a metal frame, with a nose that split open to admit large cargo. It required too many tow planes. So the Gigant was fitted with its own engines. The whole idea might now have worked if they’d begun to think of the project as a plane. But, they were stuck on the idea of a glider. A huge glider with big engines had all kinds of problems. 201 Gigants were made, some with engines and some without. Besides everything else, they were extremely slow and unmaneuverable. Even with fighter escorts, they were easy targets.
Heh. Tow planes. They came up with the Heinkel 111Z to try to get this baby aloft. Two He111s siamesed together with a fifth engine on the wing centre section.
You may be starting to get a mental picture of that cartoon of a swing hanging from a tree, and the various modifications made to deal with one flaw after another…
Lets see- guns with curved barrels for shooting around corners.
the gyrojet pistol: almost as effective as a .45, but much, much more expensive. And set fire to anything it hit would have been a bonus, but the gun was wildly inaccurate.
The jetpack- not a terrible idea, but thirty seconds of controlled flight is good for nothing.
The civil war idea of simultaniously firing two cannons loaded with cannonballs connected by a chain. The problem was the simultanious part.
About the jetpacks—most of the ones tested and in use today were actually rocket propelled. Bell was working on one with a true Jet engine which—and I think it made it to the prototype stage—actually had a seven minute endurance. Still not great, or militarily practical, but hey, cool enough.
You left out the interesting part. The Gyrojet didn’t shoot bullets. It fired mini-rockets. The ammo conatinedd its own fuel, and increased in speed and damge as it flew.
I think you got the Gigant and the flying tank confused. This is the flying tank and this is the Gigant. The Gigant did start its life as a glider (Me 321) and had engines added later on, becoming the Me 323.
My personal favorite wacky military project:
The Nuclear Ramjet cruise missile - Project Pluto
Capable of cruising at supersonic speeds, and of staying airborne for weeks, they eventually hit upon the idea of simply driving it back and forth across the Soviet Union after it had delivered it’s 12 warheads to their targets, spewing radioactive exhaust over the countryside.
The Spruce Goose was a good idea, just that the war ended before it could prove itself. We still employ the same principle today, look at the C-5 Galaxy…
There was also the EX-41, an experimental pump-action version of the M-79 grenade launcher. All the sites about it online seem to be dead at the moment, though.
And personally, I would have been interested in seeing an alternate WW2 where the B-36 was used regulary in combat, instead of becoming a historical footnote like it did.
Hadn’t heard of the German Chocolate surprise! (Thanks for that one, Larry.) The British had a similar turn of mind with explosive lumps of coal, but my personal favourite was the land mine disguised as camel crap, for use in North Africa. (Saw it on a documentary about the Special Operations Executive (SOE), where a chap’s top secret assignment was to obtain a representative sample of camel crap from London zoo.)
The really cunning version had the imprint of a tyre track already running through it…
**“I realised that if anyone is driving for hours in the desert it gets so bloody monotonous, if he sees a pile of dung ahead, he’ll drive through it — just for something different. So I came to the conclusion that if we made dummy dung and put in a tyrebuster, a small charge with a metal pin in, we could blow the whole bloody wheel off a German vehicle.”
In a separate reference, I came across another unusual character , Carleton Coon , an eccentric anthropologist, trained by the SOE and employed as an agent for the OSS. Coon was famous for his disappearing donkey act : "A compliant and unsuspecting donkey would be loaded with a timing device and a whopping seventy-five pounds of the new plastic explosive, “composition C’. A child would tether this trojan horse to the nearest tent full of German officers and then quietly slip away. At the preordained moment, donkey, tent, and the Wermacht’s best and brightest would all disappear in a thunderous explosion and terrible flash of light. Or so it was hoped.”**
It was invented by Aussie novelist Neville Shute – there’s a great bit of footage of it being tested on a beach. A dog starts chasing it, it gets out of control and starts chasing the dog! with rockets getting loose and flying around the sand passed the terrified mutt.
There was a series on British tv some time ago which dedicated an episode to the ideas that didn’t make it – the ones that I remember include a German attempt to use retro-rockets instead of parachutes (why I don’t know), the test footage mostly showed the payload (a light truck IIRC) slamming into the ground at full speed, the retros would then fire and blast the wreckage skywards again.
(More recently"Credible Sport" suggests that timing is still everything when having fun with rockets
No shit!)
Also featured was an American idea for making planes invisible by putting bright lights on the leading edge of the wings to eliminate the silhouette. Tests showed it actually worked (so long as the plane was coming straight at you, which an attacking plane would be)
From what I’ve heard the pigeon-guided missile had a fair chance of success - after all a pigeon represents a greater amount of image-processing and spatial awareness than even the best guidance systems today. The steering-mechanism/poultry interface may have been a bit clunky, but no worse than a lot of what saw service in WWII
In fact much of the stuff that was actually used on D-Day seemed pretty mad - except it (mostly) worked (though as the “Bangalore Torpedo” incident dramatised in Private Ryan showed, the poor sods who had to make them work weren’t always so appreciative of the inventive genius behind them) Hobart’s Funnies Mulberry and Pluto
Radar was partly born out of research into using “death-rays” (just… don’t!) to destroy aircraft rather than detect them
Yehudi camoflage. It works on tanks and camps too. Far enough way, the lights blend into the daytime sky and render the object invisible. It was declassified for decades. Then, the military reclassified it. They had decided that they could make stealth aircraft difficult enough to detect by radar that an enemy’s first warning would be visual. Popular Science had an article on lights being mounted on the plane’s underside as well. There is also research into translucent panels in the wings. These would make it more difficult to see an aircraft from beneath.
IMHO Yehudi camoflage does not belong in this thread. It may very well work. Some birds of prey have evolved natural Yehudi camoflage. Their wings are largely translucent in sunlight. At hunting altitude, this greatly reduces the shadow they cast on the ground, and makes them invisible to prey looking up.
