Howdy once again sports fans!
The book is progressing very well and we have made great progress since the first time I sent an email out. The inventions keep piling up and every day I'm more and more impressed with the work Mike Doscher and Josh Hass are contributing to the project. Mike is the technical illustrator on the book and his knowledge of World War II vehicles helps him realize inventions that sometimes have only vague technical illustrations. Josh is an amazing color artist who brings the inventions to life. Imagine a jet-powered suicide bomb whizzing a hundred feet above the ocean through flak bursts and tracers at an Allied ship and you have some idea of what Josh is doing.
My inspiration for the book has in many ways been closely related to the old space exploration books that used to clutter libraries. If you've seen one, you know what I'm talking about. They were packed with incredible speculative art of various far-fetched NASA projects that were on the table but probably ended up never seeing the light of day. Those books were always pretty slim on the details, so with this book I wanted to combine that fun sense of adventure with detailed research and technical information. Helping the two meet is the fact that so many of these projects are either really cool or really stupid. Every project in the book is real and to make it into the book there had to be quite a bit of corroborating evidence. No Nazi UFOs or Foo Fighters in this one.
To give me a chance to paint a picture each entry will include a hypothetical deployment of the weapon or vehicle and the effects this might have had on the war. Invariably this has been the section where I am able to inject the most humor and usually I talk about how a given invention would have failed or caused problems. I recently completed the entry for the Weser P. 1003/1 VTOL aircraft. Think of it as a smaller version of the Osprey.
Here's an excerpt from its Hypothetical Service History in which it is known as the We 266 Libelle or "Dragonfly".
Despite Skorzeny's failed mission and the constant technical issues the We 266 remained in service until production was cancelled in August of 1943. Though the We 266 served fairly well it was hated by air crews and was termed the "jumping casket" by nervous Luftwaffe personnel. Airborne infantry often complained that they would be riding in a We 266 rather than parachuting from a more conventional transport. The usage of the We 266 as an assault transport was halted in July of 1944 when an entire force of six aircraft, laden with infantry, was lost to a pair of American fighters over France.
Mike Doscher has just completed two rough draft sketches of the Weser P. 1003/1. The first of these compares the Weser from technical illustrations to the modern V-22 Osprey and the second illustration shows a modified variant of the Weser that is larger to accommodate more troops and cargo. You can check them out on the booklist archive site:
Josh Hass has just started in on his painting of a schwarm of Go 229 (aka Ho IX) night fighters about to pounce on a large Allied bombing formation. I mentioned the Ho IX in last month's booklist email. You can check out Josh's rough draft to get some idea of what the final version might look like on the booklist site:
Finally, I've been working on researching the P. 1500 "Monster", a piece of super-sized self propelled artillery that combined a vehicle larger than the Ratte with the 800mm K (E) "Dora" railway gun. Dora and its companion remain to this day the largest artillery pieces ever constructed. There is very little information out there on the P. 1500 "Monster," and not even a single technical illustration survived the war, so it has been one of the more difficult projects thus far.
Once again I would like to nag you to tell your friends, family, and internet chums about the book and direct them to the booklist sign up page. Thousands of you have signed up already, but the more people who are excited about the book's release the more stores the book will appear in.
Next week, in addition to the usual progress report we will be offering an exclusive download for booklist subscribers! Dun, dun, dunnnnnnnn!
Thanks for reading!
- Zack
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