The area's the Allies were ahead in were far more influential than those the Germans were ahead in.
Some examples: radar/sonar, decryption/encryption, nuclear weapons, proximity fuzes, anti biotics.
Swings and roundabouts. If it weren't for the dangerous lack of fuel, there would have been a much harder time against the various armed-and-armoured vehicles that were superior to the Allied equipment. Eventually, a Little Boy might have been used against the Reich, and/or the Russian multiplied effort of lesser tanks would have eaten more into the material costs, rather than the problems being so much the ethanol-blend fuels de-emulsifying in the cold on the variously extant areas of the Eastern Front, and their dabbling with things like the C-Stoff/T-Stoff rocketplane.
So fuel wasn't the only problem, but it was a throttling influence on the ability to send technically superior tanks, especially, against the sometimes pitiful land and air efforts of the Allies. We couldn't even really match them with the Fireflies (sufficient gun, still not so great on armour), and were sending previous-generation armour up against superior Tiger variants often enough.
They certainly missed tricks in the other fields. They could have built far more upon Hertz's original radarish thing (and Behm's sonar), but did have good designs/counter-designs in the Funksmessgerat system. Their code-
making was more successful than their (somewhat uncoordinated) code-breaking, with increasingly complex systems, only to be self-sabotaged by mis-use at ground level. Imagine if Zuse had taken his Z3 in a different direction? It is said that the Uranverein effort failed most of all due to lack of uranium ore (and possibly luck). The fuse programme was one of those that suffered from the interference of Hitler ("if you can't do it in six months, it's not worth doing, because we'll have won by then" - 1939/40). Penicillin failed to reach the Wehrmacht lines through a mix of failures much as already mentioned.
Non-Axis powers had their own failures, but as they won it's hard to say which bits of bad luck were most fatal to their war efforts, even in hindsight.
But none of this determines how the dice will roll. Only that NK has a huge gap between its ability to deploy a truly large amount of infantry (slightly less starving than the general population, which might even help keep them focussed on their morale against the devil enemies) and some wildcard weaponry that very few people want to allow to be used to check their true efficacy. In the middle, there is not really much of the righr hard-skinned mobile stuff. Estimates of the number of active planes are pessimistic when it comes to how the (generation or two lagging) airfleet would hold up against even just the on-station forces. Their big (little-T) trump-card is their blanket-shelling capability, really. The nuclear weaponry is like the end-game (map-based) contest in Civilization where every NPC that you haven't sufficiently sabotaged just keeps going on about their nuclear weapons. (I still tended to invade with Armour, not bother with Artillery, and have Bombers(+Carriers) for awkward cross-sea attacks, but if I couldn't mop up Nuke pollution-damage on my own land by this point, there was no reason to use them much myself. My tech focus tended be to get Railroad ASAP for easy dispersal of units across my territory, Automobile for the tanks, then the techs to get the SS segments, if I was still in the running but not yet destined to triumph by conflict. Getting the Manhattan Project wonder was only an aim insofar as "get as many wonders as I can", and the tech required for it doesn't lead to anything more interesting the Fusion Power anti-meltdown buffing effect.)
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Topic: Additional CIA japes [DPRK Thread] (Read 541291 times)