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& Politics is based on extensive archival research of contemporary German documents and includes numerous previously unpublished period drawings as well as 50 new full colour profile artworks.

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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.
Click to expand...

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 webites, 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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