The YB-40 Gunship
When the USAAF’s Eighth Air Force arrived in Britain in mid-1942, it was confident that unescorted formations of B-17 Flying Fortresses could make precision daylight bombing raids without suffering...
View ArticleBack to the Drawing Board: the Davy Crockett ‘Tactical’ Nuke
In the 1950s, the Cold War was at its height. To many, it seemed to be a question of when, rather than if, Soviet forces would exploit their overwhelming numerical superiority with a ‘steamroller’...
View ArticleBack to the Drawing Board: The Supermarine Nighthawk
One of the oddest inventions was the Supermarine Nighthawk, a massive twin-engine quadruplane night fighter designed to fly patrols of anything up to 18 hours at a time, with a fully-enclosed heated...
View ArticleBack to the Drawing Board: the T-64 Tank
Although its ‘high-tech’ features, such as an auto-loader for the main armament and its ultra-compact multi-fuel engine, were superficially impressive, they proved to be complex to maintain and highly...
View ArticleBack to the Drawing Board: the Lockheed F-104 Starfighter
It was a futuristic-looking aircraft, which Lockheed publicised as ‘a missile with a man in it’.
View ArticleBack to the Drawing Board: the ‘Sticky Bomb’
The idea ‘took off’ in the aftermath of the Dunkirk evacuation, when a German invasion seemed imminent and there was a critical shortage of anti-tank weapons
View ArticleBack to the Drawing Board: Rifled muzzle-loading artillery (RML)
The mid 19th century saw a revolution in naval weapons technology – smooth-bore muzzle-loading artillery, which had changed little for over 300 years, was suddenly supplanted by far larger rifled guns...
View ArticleBack to the Drawing Board: Vasa
Although Vasa was designed and built by an experienced Dutch shipbuilder, Henrik Hybertsson, she was larger than any vessel he had previously worked on.
View ArticleBack to the Drawing Board: HMS Glatton
Sometimes poor quality-control can be as lethal as bad design – this was certainly true in the case of HMS Glatton.
View ArticleBack to the Drawing Board: A39 Tortoise Heavy Assault Tank
David Porter on military history’s doomed inventions
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