Messerschmitt Me 328 Development & Politics by Dan Sharp

The first title in the 'Development & Politics' series was Messerschmitt Me 262. Then there was Messerschmitt Me 309 and now this one - Messerschmitt Me 328. However, due to unforeseen circumstances I've ended up leapfrogging myself and Messerschmitt Me 328 has beaten its predecessor to print!
While Me 309's pages are currently being designed (though this final stage won't take long), Me 328 is already at the printers and should be available very soon.

Pre-order: Messerschmitt Me 328 Development & Politics

Author: Dan Sharp
Imprint: Tempest Books
ISBN: 9781911704201
Format: Hardback
Pages: 188
Published: May 24, 2024 (probably sooner, in fact)

There was huge excitement when Argus engineer Günther Diedrich succeeded in building a pulsejet powerful enough to propel a car up to 100km/h in 1941 – it was simple, cheap and lightweight, and before long Germany’s premier fighter manufacturer Messerschmitt had come up with a simple, cheap and lightweight airframe on which to mount it – the Me 328.

The new aircraft was first pitched as an interceptor, then as a parasite bomber for attacks on America, then as an airborne version of the infamous Soviet Katyusha rocket launcher, to fire heavyweight rocket-bombs at Allied shipping. Prototypes were built and flown both as gliders and under pulsejet power, and when Nazi fanatics needed an aircraft suitable for suicide attacks against high-value Allied targets, their first choice was the Me 328. Yet the type never fulfilled the grandiose ambitions of those who designed, built and supported it.

Dan Sharp unravels a development history that was anything but straightforward to find out exactly what happened to the Luftwaffe’s most enigmatic ‘secret project’ aircraft. Messerschmitt Me 328 Development & Politics is based on extensive archival research of contemporary German documents and includes numerous previously unpublished period drawings as well as 50 new full colour profile artworks.

Messerschmitt Me 328 Development & Politics.jpg
 
All 1,200 printed copies of this are due to arrive in the publisher's warehouse tomorrow - along with all 1,200 copies of Messerschmitt Me 309 Development & Politics, according to the courier. Here are the advance copies, along with Westland - which is also arriving tomorrow.

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GTX said:
I wish there were ebook versions of these available as well.
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Prior to the launch of Mortons Books, Mortons' bookazines were made available as both Kindle editions and ebooks. With the Kindle editions, customers complained that they were dramatically inferior to the printed versions because it was impossible to present the huge number of full colour (or at least not simply pure b/w) images usually included at anything like a decent quality. Things may be different now - this was a while ago - but because of the way Kindle works, you had to supply Amazon with a file with the images embedded. And Amazon then charged extra to host the file if it was above a certain filesize. And it couldn't go above a certain filesize cap. Even a few decent-sized images made the filesize so big it became unusable (IIRC it was something like 70MB). So you were forced to downgrade the quality of all images and nobody was happy with that.
With ebooks, it was found that they were almost immediately pirated as soon as they became available, and shared across a myriad of different websites, to the point where it was impossible to get all the copies taken down. Since the original ebooks were being offered via, I think, four different vendors at the time (again, a long while ago), four very subtly different versions were created (tiny one or two pixel differences on one particular page) to see where the 'leak' was - who were the files being copied from? And it turned out they were coming from all vendors. It became apparent that the pirates had software enabling them to 'rip' the ebooks from any vendor, no matter what you tried to do to prevent it.
With a bookazine, which is a mass-market product sold on newsagents' and supermarket shelves, it was determined that it was still worth offering the ebook despite the piracy. But with large high-quality hardback books, with a high retail price, it really wasn't.
Of course, pirates can still get hold of a hard copy of the book and just scan it - you can't stop that - but the result isn't quite so perfect as something created from the original pdfs.
 
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These three arrived just in time for my summer vacations (2 via mortons and 1 by amazon). So now I will have a good read. I´m especially keen on the Me 328 book. But Me 309 and 328 books seem to hold many new facts on the complex relationship between engineering, economics and power in the Third Reich.
Cheers and a good summer to all of you!
 

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Done and dusted.

An interesting and fascinating look into an idea which was never able to deliver on its promise of a cheap, easy-to-build but very fast and capable airplane, thanks mostly to issues with the propulsion system. An aircraft that never got the resources it needed to bring it to fruition... but this mostly due to the fact that the engines were always down on the promise of thrust while simultaneously doing their best to shake both pilot and aircraft to death - a problem which was never solved before the aircraft was overtaken by progress and circumstance and the axe fell.

The non-technically-minded reader can be forgiven for asking why the V-1 did not appear to have a problem in this regard - after all, thousands were built and launched and reached their targets. Appendix 2 (page 162, column 2) makes it clear that it very definitely did, although I think it could have been noted more prominently in the main body of the work that Messerschmitt weren't the only ones to have trouble with the structural and pilot integrity of pulsejet-powered aircraft.

I have now read all three of Dan's Development and Politics books. If the story of the Me 309 is one of terminal mismanagement and the 262 one of splendid promise hindered by the dragging of feet, that of the 328 has to be a Greek tragedy; a seemingly sure-fire technological bet that sadly turned out to be a busted flush.
 
pathology_doc said:
Done and dusted.

An interesting and fascinating look into an idea which was never able to deliver on its promise of a cheap, easy-to-build but very fast and capable airplane, thanks mostly to issues with the propulsion system. An aircraft that never got the resources it needed to bring it to fruition... but this mostly due to the fact that the engines were always down on the promise of thrust while simultaneously doing their best to shake both pilot and aircraft to death - a problem which was never solved before the aircraft was overtaken by progress and circumstance and the axe fell.

The non-technically-minded reader can be forgiven for asking why the V-1 did not appear to have a problem in this regard - after all, thousands were built and launched and reached their targets. Appendix 2 (page 162, column 2) makes it clear that it very definitely did, although I think it could have been noted more prominently in the main body of the work that Messerschmitt weren't the only ones to have trouble with the structural and pilot integrity of pulsejet-powered aircraft.

I have now read all three of Dan's Development and Politics books. If the story of the Me 309 is one of terminal mismanagement and the 262 one of splendid promise hindered by the dragging of feet, that of the 328 has to be a Greek tragedy; a seemingly sure-fire technological bet that sadly turned out to be a busted flush.
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I was surprised to discover that the Me 328 was a 'weapons system' with a particular rocket bomb designed and developed in parallel just for use by that specific aircraft.

The noise/vibration problem does seem to have been alleviated somewhat by repositioning the engines - and the FGZ claimed at the end of the war to have solved it by putting two pulsejets right next to one another. But actually getting more thrust out of them seems to have been a bridge too far. The Germans could get so much but no more, seemingly no matter what they tried.
 
newsdeskdan said:
The noise/vibration problem does seem to have been alleviated somewhat by repositioning the engines - and the FGZ claimed at the end of the war to have solved it by putting two pulsejets right next to one another.
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Alas, too late to rescue the airplane's bad name in this regard.
newsdeskdan said:
But actually getting more thrust out of them seems to have been a bridge too far.
Click to expand...
Reading about the Me262 being considered to use multiple pulsejets sometimes makes me wonder what would have happened if they'd tried that on the Me262 V1 (with the piston engine there to take over if it failed), or simply lashed out and tried to solve the 328's power issues by putting two pulsejets under each wing. They might have found the mutual resonance solution by accident, assuming that relocating it into the tail wasn't also part of the cure.
 
pathology_doc said:
Reading about the Me262 being considered to use multiple pulsejets sometimes makes me wonder what would have happened if they'd tried that on the Me262 V1 (with the piston engine there to take over if it failed), or simply lashed out and tried to solve the 328's power issues by putting two pulsejets under each wing. They might have found the mutual resonance solution by accident, assuming that relocating it into the tail wasn't also part of the cure.
Click to expand...

Presumably, although there were clearly project drawings showing Me 328s with multiple underwing pulsejets, it was thought that they ought to get the singular units working properly first and go from there - little realising that actually 'going big' might have provided the solution they'd been looking for.
 
newsdeskdan said:
Presumably, although there were clearly project drawings showing Me 328s with multiple underwing pulsejets, it was thought that they ought to get the singular units working properly first and go from there - little realising that actually 'going big' might have provided the solution they'd been looking for.
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"And isn't it ironic... don't you think..." :p
 

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