What was the thought process behind the B-17 Flying Fortress...

I never said it was the best idea.
I mean a ton of ideas that they thought of in the interwar era were retarded.

Case in point: The entire Japanese naval strategy.

Care to elaborate on the Japanese navy? I love hearing stories about nip autism, like that time Japanese damage control turned an aircraft carrier with a damaged av-gas depot into a floating fuel-air bomb.

Building two 70,000 ton battleships (and planning another 4) despite using aircraft carriers more successfully. Overarming their ships to the point where they could either suffer severe hull damage or capsize in rough seas. Fucking over the Army whenever possible, and so on.

>What was the thought process behind the B-17 Flying Fortress? It was designed as an anti-ship bomber hurling unguided bombs which are useless against boats.

Nobody at the time was informed enough to really evaluate how effective level bombing could be against an actively maneuvering ship. Billy Mitchell only demonstrated the destructive potential in 1921.

In any case, a fast, multi-engine level bomber is a better aircraft for patrolling territorial waters than a torpedo bomber. Torpedoes are more effective at sinking ships, but flying at high altitude is more efficient and gives a better platform for spotting enemy ships to begin with. If it were fit with torpedoes it would have to dive all the way down to sea level and then climb all the way back up.

Obviously level bombing ended up being terribly inefficient against moving ships, which is why later maritime patrol aircraft were adapted to drop torpedoes and mines.

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>Yamato
hell no

US Navy Torpedoes were unreliable pieces of junk unfit for service

in fairness, the Yamato class battleships were commissioned before Pearl Harbor, and after the carrier proved its dominance in naval warfare once and for all in Midway, Japan cancelled all battleship construction while US shipyards continued to roll out BBs

Source?

>It was designed as an anti-ship bomber
What?

Nice meme, kid

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Go look up literally anything except whatever meme history shitting on the US so an American could make money off self flagellation and then get back to me.

Fixed by late 1943.
Christie and everyone in charge should've been fired from a torpedo tube.

It's not meme history you imbecile. Read a fucking book.

And despite them being hilariously unreliable (American) submarines still sank more Japanese tonnage than the rest of the Allied armies combined, including the rest of the American army.

No you, faggot. Look up when the goddamn Yamato sank and how. Fucking imbecile.

Armies?
The bulk of tonnage sunk by torpedo was in 1944, after the torpedoes were fixed. Not much was left to sink in 1945.

>the rest of the Allied armies combined, including the rest of the American army
i'd imagine it would be quite difficult for a land force to sink merchant shipping

Armies is not the Army, ya smart-aleck. Though the US Army (airforce) did sink quite a few Japanese ships.

The bulk, sure, but torpedos still devastated Japanese shipping starting basically immediately. The mk14 was a shitheap of untested failure but the failure rate was still only 50%, and one torpedo can sink a capital ship. And as someone (maybe you?) mentioned the thing was completely fixed by the end of 1943, and on par with or better than any comparable torpedo.

No.
Stationed there first, yes.

>failure rate was still "only" 50%
Only in the Navy.

The navy that had so completely shitfucked the Japanese with torpedoes that by the time it was fixed they actually struggled to find anything worth using a torpedo on?

Yeah.

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While the Mk.14 torpedo had problems, more so than the torpedo itself was the inaccurate and poor tactics the skippers at the beginning of the war were using. Setting the torpedo depth too low, relying solely on sonar attacks because they were afraid of running too shallow, firing way outside of a real range as to ensure a hit because they were scared of getting too close to the target, and in general not being aggressive enough. The captains at the beginning of the war had been made daft by their improper interwar training wherein 'kills' were made on US ships in exercises that in reality would have never scored a hit.

Even before the Mk.14 was fully fixed the mere replacements of these skippers by more younger XO's who were more hungry for getting close and ensuring kills were already enough to sky rocket the success rate for US subs in the PTO

>Setting the torpedo depth too low
That was because the torpedoes often randomly chose an operating depth that was something like 6 feet deeper than set via TDC. Which could cause a torp to pass clean under a ship instead of hitting; since the magnetic pistol didn't work, that meant a miss instead of a spinebreaker.
The result was that captains set their torps to run close to surface (arguing that they'll run deeper anyway), however this made the torps vulnerable to porpoising in the event they actually happened to run at set depth.

They were also setting the depth low because they were using the magnetic pistol every time. Set for impact with the shallowest depth almost always made a hit if done right. Again, this all draws to incorrect indondrication during training.

>They were also setting the depth low because they were using the magnetic pistol every time
why would they do that? The hole point of the magnetic pistol is to run deep and detonate under the keel

Because 1, it didn't work, 2, you're not supposed to use it in rough seas or foul weather. There's a reason there 2 different ways of detonating the warhead, not one. Again, the younger XO's immediately switched to impact and shallow depth settings after they witnessed so many misses.

Pray tell, what use would the B-17 have on Hawaii other than as anti-ship aircraft?

>hurling unguided bombs which are useless against boats

That isn't so far off.

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Recommend the book Japanese Destroyer Captain. Good insight into issues with IJN.

U.S. Army has more boats than the navy.
Navy has more planes than the air force.

You just gotta do it right
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skip_bombing

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>" A thousand bombers could be built at the same cost as one battleship, and could sink that battleship"

One NC-class cost the same as about 200 B-17s.

That quote is from the 20's.

This retard again.
>what was the thought process behind (incredibly misconstrued and ass backwards interpretation of a Western design) and why did it happen.
>12 hours later
>what was the (superior/quantum/grorious) thought process behind (insert Sino/Soviet Design)?

You’re a waste of space on this board and the mods should be ashamed for allowing you to post these copy-paste threads.

That’s one of the most mouth-breathing myths passed around the Internet. The Air Force probably has more F-16s alone than every plane in the Navy.

>unguided bombs which are useless against boats
tell it to Force Z

Maritime patrol aircraft rarely flew above the cloud layer, if at all. Being lower down helps with spotting silhouettes.

Prince of Wales and Repulse sank due to torpedo hits, not from bombs.

We bomber mafia now.

>prototype B-17 crashes because pilot forgot to disengage the gust locks
>navy almost manages to convince the congress to halt the B-17 program and divert the resources towards them instead
>suddenly pic related flies in from Moscow through the North Pole and lands in California
[ANGRY ROOSEVELT NOISES]
>how the fuck did this happen
>clearly the Russians are figuring out how to long range aviation, their aeronautical know-how is clearly a lot more advanced than it was believed
>this may cause problems in the long run
>the B-17 program is generously funded again

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