An invention is an idea and you make proof of it by a Patent. Hülsmeyer not only did invent the radar, he built a proof of concept design which was not only proofed in the labarotory but also puplically on the Rhine river (as well as in theUS). So he not only invented it, but developed to about TRL3.
What Hülsmeyer invented was more like a radio interference detector like RUS 1 and 2 by the Soviets or a similar invention by the French in 1939. This doesn't give a range and bearing to the target, but rather lets you know something is out there and in the field of the detector. So, Hülsmeyer's invention would let a ship mounting one know that there was something in the fog ahead before it could be seen giving more time to slow down or make some evasive maneuver.
The M262 shot down about 550 Allied aircrafts, despite the German Luftwaffe beeing totally outnumbered, so they operated very sucsessful.
That's highly questionable. The 262 had between 300 and 500-ish kills credited to it, depending on source. That's roughly a 4 to 4.5 to 1 kill ratio. That's actually pretty low for a fighter aircraft.
The problem with the 262 was that by the beginning of 1944, it was a self-defeating aircraft. Even if it suffered ZERO actual combat losses, the Germans would have never been able to keep more than about 60 to 100 planes operational, if that. Between the 262's voracious fuel consumption (roughly triple that of a Fw 190 or Me 109), and the plane's general unreliability, keeping even 60 flying was beyond the Luftwaffe's capacity to maintain, repair, or replace non-combat losses alone.
In the very begining of Me262 operation the Allied profitated very much by shooting them down during the landing phase, later on this was spotted by putting Flacks in the landing path, so the early numbers are not representative.
Doesn't matter how the Allies countered them. They did. They also had their own jets in the pipeline to be put into service so the 262 would soon face something equal to itself with even better Allied jets to follow while their own industry struggled to produce almost anything.
BTW, The He177 also had remote controled guns.
Sour grapes. The control system on the 177 worked poorly. The gunner operating the turret was completely reliant on using tracers to try and walk the guns into the target. There was no fire control system. There was no offset for parallax errors. It might be described as amateurish compared to the system on the B-29.
The Allied sailers sunken by the Zaunkoenig sulry weren't laughing about it.... The decoy used as countermeassure slowed down allied Konvois conciderable and made them more vulnerable. Besides that, the countermeassure device (Foxer) produced intentionally a lot of noise which attracted German submarines.
Convoys advanced at a constant speed based on the merchant ships in it. There were slow and fast convoys. The slow ones were generally the target for U-boats. These advanced at 5 to 7 knots. Fast convoys did 9 to 11 knots. Ships capable of 15 or more knots generally steamed independently as they were safer doing that given their speed than being tied down in a convoy.
Also, as the war advanced, fewer and fewer Allied merchant ships were slow ones. US built Liberty ships could cruise at 9 knots easily while a Victory ship could cruise at 12.
The faster the ships went, the more difficult they became to target. U-boats did 4 to 6 knots submerged so they couldn't even really attack a convoy that way unless they lined up on its predicted location in advance and let the convoy run over it. This is why most Allied escorts formed a screen across the front of the convoy with interlocking sonar scanning.
Once the escorts had radar, attacking surfaced was suicide so that cut out even thinking about attacking a fast convoy at all.
The Geyer Torpedo was fielded before thewar ended, but propably never used. If was equiped with an activ echo sounder and made the Foxer useless. The MK24 Topedo was just a passive topedo, just like the Zaunkönig.
Another day late and Mark short invention for Germany.
Here we find a site (
https://uboat.net/allies/technical/fido.htm) with much praise on the MK24, but the actual hit rate according to the same source was clearly below 10%,. Note, for obvious reasons, accoustic decoys could not be draged behind submarines.
One reason for that is the Allies, by 1943 could afford to expend ordinance on less than solid contacts. That is, they could attack probable targets aggressively even if there actually was nothing there. There was little or no downside to that for them.
