On the other hand, Friedman did manage to do so with USN ship classes, of which there were quite a few given the General Board's concept and design philosophy which early on was quite scientific in nature. Certainly a good bit of Friedman's drafts hit the editing floor. And, at that, Friedman was hobbled by coming in late to the game so to speak given most of the shipyards and their records, archival materials and design bureau records having disappeared. Still, he did try and the results are seen as near-definitive when discussing naval architecture. Norm had some help, but truly he was the prime foce behind the collecting and writing. A writer on aircraft would have some added benefit of the fact that the history and drawings are with companies which still exist and, ironically, preserved by reason of reluctance to declassify information in the postwar era.
Certainly Friedman could have topped the 500 page mark even with his information limited work on battleships, and indeed, you see the spillover into the USN cruiser book. Admittedly, a workable tome on US bomber studies would likely rival War and Peace, but breaking up the work into parts such as Years 19xx to 19yy or by classification, light/medium/heavy, whatnot, makes the matter more manageable. After all, one is looking at design in general and by class, and doing very little with field mods and the such, in keeping with a rule of reason and indeed, to avoid the carping criticism that not everything was presented.
Given the military sometimes makes work, fascinating that a team of archivists hadn't jumped on that project!
