pometablava said:
As Lark says, it is nothing more left to be said.
Oh, there's *lots* more to be said. Some of it glowing praise, some of it technical description, and some of it profanity-laced invective. I'm particularly fond of the latter, and reasonably well skilled at it.
As previously mentioned, much of the "Luft '46" design work was "sales material." But there was a special extra incentive that the wartime German designers had that most other designers, especially in the West, have not had: if you turn out to be superfluous... it's off to the Russian front with you. And since by 1944 there was really no practical need for aircraft designers - what the Germans needed was aircraft *builders* - the designers had to make it look like they were needed. Consequently, they'd dream up War Winning Futuristic Designs that would look damned impressive, but wouldn't necessarily work. Of course, these designs didn' *need* to work. They just needed to impress the brass long enough to let the designer avoid that east-bound train.
Something very similar seems to have happened just after the war as well. After von Braun turned himself in, he gave interviews to US Army interogators where he described all the neato projects his team was working on, under his direction: satellite launchers, space shuttles, space stations and more. However, he never seems to have turned over any actual design data. And after discussing this with a few Peenemunde rocketeers, they claim that such projects were *not* underway, beyond late-night casual discussions. But von Braun seems to have tried to give across the impression that these designs were fairly advanced.
What would be the reason for this exaggeration on von Braun's part? Simple: he wanted a job. In effect, I believe he was padding his resume with things he thought the US Army would want, and that he wanted to work on. It worked.
Von Braun was a very rare animal: equal parts quality engineer, good manager and effective con man. Rather than look on this with distaste, I'm actually quite envious of those skills. Because those are the sorts of things that are needed to make a real change sometimes. But while an effective way to Get Things Done, smoke-and-mirrors (be it some advanced bullcrap jet fighter design or some handwavy claim of space launch vehicles) often leads to mucked-up history.