>all 1918 Gotha bomber raids on Paris caused approximately 241 civilian deaths in total>shells by the 'Paris Gun' killed about 250 civilians in Paris between March and August 1918Why did the Germans even try to bombard the city with their flying soapboxes when they had a literal stratosphere gun available that did the job much better? The construction of WWI-era bombers and zeppelins seems like a total waste of resources and time when they could have just invested all that into u-boats and artillery.
when you have a bunch of newfangled technology that's all being proclaimed as "the weapon of tomorrow" and shit like that you gotta actually use it to find out if it's any good or not
>>65256860They're much more mobile and longer-ranged than a railway gunGotha bombers actually dropped a pretty impressive bombload and couldn't be shot down with flakAnd Zeppelins were nigh unstoppableEven after the war ended, there was talk about banning bombersBombers were the atomic bombs or ballistic missiles of their time
>7kg payloadlollmao
>>65256870>And Zeppelins were nigh unstoppable...how was a giant whale full of explosive gas unstoppable?
>>65258583Remember that high altitude performance of 1914 fighters was garbage and it wasnt like we had decades of air defense experience to draw from for AAA. Zeppelins could legitimately bomb certain targets with impunity at altitude
>>65258583They were huge, covered in covered in defensive machine guns and flew at an altitude fewy few aircraft at the time could reach. With normal ball ammo, you just end up poking lots of tiny holes in it, which doesn't leak that quickly enough. Remember that there multiple separate gas tanks/balloons inside the structure and that they could also repaired in flight. Tracer rounds were invented specifically to ignite the zeppelin gas tanks, but even then they still had the altitude advantage for most of the war.
>The shells were propelled at such a high velocity that each successive shot wore away a considerable amount of steel from the rifled bore. Each shell was sequentially numbered according to its increasing diameter, and had to be fired in numeric order, lest the projectile lodge in the bore and the gun explode.Fuckign germans man
>>65256860to divert resources from the front into defending the home islands with AA, air raid bunkers, and air interception squadrons
>>65258583Zepps flew too high for the early planes to get to. It took 30 minutes for early fighters to get to their max altitude and usually it is still too low.
>During 1917-18, the bombing raids on London resulted in 487 deaths and 1,434 other casualties. German squadron Bogohl 3 lost 24 Gothas as shot down or missing, with another 36 destroyed or seriously damaged in landing accidents.>more losses due to landing than to enemy fireFlying a giant WWI plane sounds like a nightmare.
>>65259625>fly a giant kite made out of thin steel and canvas with a lawnmower across the channel, drop bombs, then return and land it on some bicycle wheels>oh, and no instruments or enclosed cockpit, tooKamikaze even if they didn't have the word yet
>>65256860that mission towards german east africa by a zeppelin was epic. I will do an AI movie about that when the technology is ready.
>>65259632Flight duty was horribly dangerous in WW1, and the fact that they lost more planes on landing than to enemy fire should tell you why.Hint: It has nothing to do with suicide missions.
>>65258748This is the actual answer, giant guns have barrel lifes measured in the high 10s to low 100s of rounds, and they're extremely expensive to make and not that hard to destroy.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLwsl_BH1Gs
>>65258748Even crazier is the fact that the first few shells missed the targets by a literal mile because the Germans had forgotten to account for the coriolis forces, i.e. different parts of the surface of the earth rotate at different speeds depending on their latitude.
>>65256860Now compare the impacts of the Paris Guns (they were 3) with the bomber hits.It's also interesting to note that the guns were commanded by a vice-admiral and manned by navy gunners, because the German command thought that they navy would be better at shooting giant calibers.
