Chapter 161: The First Knight of the Sky
It had been years since Bruno first introduced his designs for the concept of a functional tank. What Bruno had conceptualized was a rough draft. It was based upon his knowledge of tanks from his past life, crudely drawn blueprints of a theoretical tank based upon a design from the Second World War during his past life, and of course, his own current functional knowledge of mechanical engineering.
The thing was that creating machine guns, semiautomatic rifles, submachine guns, and artillery pieces was a hell of a lot easier than making armored vehicles, warships, submarines, and airplanes.
While warships and submarines were theoretically easier for his naval engineers to comprehend, as they more or less already understood such concepts, armored vehicles and warplanes were brand new applications of warfare that nobody had really conceived until now, or at least had created a functional design.
Bruno's basic concepts were, of course, revolutionary in this design, as he had a hundred-plus years of developmental history stored away within his memory and thus had a preconceived notion of what worked and what didn't.
But the rest of the world would be compelled to find this out the hard way, as they had in his past life. Even so, every component of these warplanes and armored vehicles was being designed from scratch. A semi-automatic 5cm gun, for example, was not something within the current German inventory.
The term semi-automatic was misleading to those familiar with small arms but not artillery pieces. While a semiautomatic firearm meant that it fired with one function of the trigger and automatically ejected and loaded the next cartridge, it could not be fired if one continued to hold down the trigger, unlike automatic fire, or what was commonly referred to as "fully automatic."
Semi-automatic in terms of artillery and tank guns simply meant that upon firing the main gun of the armored vehicle, it would automatically eject the spent cartridge, where a new round would manually have to be loaded by the tank crew.
This, in and of itself, was not exactly something currently employed by artillery and was seldom done so outside of anti-aircraft guns and armored vehicles. Even so, though Bruno may have given his engineers the basic principles behind its design and how it functioned, it was up to them to figure out how to make it a functional reality.
The same overall process applied to pretty much every component of the two armored vehicles he had designed, as well as the airplanes and warships. In addition to this, Bruno had also more or less done the same with the 3 1/2 ton trucks he was producing for transportation of men from the rear echelons to the front line, as well as equipment.
As a result, some of these things took longer to produce than others. It had been years since Bruno introduced the concept of the He-51 to his engineers, and even longer for the armored vehicles. Even now, the aircraft was the one with the first functional prototype, as it actually required fewer mechanical pieces to properly function.