Comments by "Sar Jim" (@sarjim4381) on "The Drydock - Episode 014" video.

@WALTERBROADDUS They did manage to bring the Heinkel DB 601A engine into production, and they were used in the Ki-61 "Tony" fighter. It was the only inline, fuel injected engine used by the Japanese, and it completely outclassed the P-40, and was at least equal to the P-38. The problem wasn't a lack of R&D. The Germans supplied the Japanese with examples and engineering drawings of almost all their advanced engines. The problem was manufacturing tolerances. The DB 601A already required close tolerances to achieve the standard 1100 horsepower, but the Japanese made the problem worse by shaving off weight wherever possible and boosting the engine to 1159 horsepower. After 1943, the supply of steel needed for correct heat treating and tolerances started to dry up, and Japanese companies like Kawasaki just didn't have the machine tools and expert machinists need for the close tolerances required. It wasn't so much that they needed German help to design better engines, they needed better materials and machines to build them.
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@WALTERBROADDUS The biggest issue for the Japanese was their inability to produce reliable engines of greater than about 1,000 horsepower. They developed airframes that were broadly capable of taking on the best of allied fighters except for contant mechanical faults with the engines. They also never developed effective superchargers for their engines, so B-29s flew with relative impunity during their bombing raids. Poor and fluctuating metallurgical supply as well as difficulties with high tolerance machining were the downfall of the Japanese aircraft industry when they finally started building higher performance fighters.
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GrayPanther, do you mean pre WWI or WWII? Since there were no US battleships built in the interwar period except for the South Dakota and Washington classes, both limited by treaty to 35,000 tons, the Panama Canal wasn't really an issue. For pre-WWi ships, I don't think any were even proposed that would have exceeded Panama Canal limits, and I doubt any exceeding those limits would have been built, even without the Canal as an obstacle. Biggest problem without the Canal was range, so US battleships would have been longer than the last standard type ships of the Colorado class. In order to achieve something like the 12,000 mile range needed to go around the Horn, those shops would have needed to be about 100 feet longer.
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