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Actually, the Nazis could have won if they didn't have a racial idealogue.

That's a popular theory... but it's not at all clear there's any truth to it, as the things that beat Germany weren't the things those guys were working on. True, they were key to the Manhattan Project (except for Einstein who took no part in the war and von Neumann who mostly did mathematical consulting work across a broad number of fields including the Manhattan project), but it's not the Manhattan project that beat Germany - it was the difference between Germany's industrial output and that of the US and the rest of the Allies.
 
WWII was, like most wars, largely a war of attrition - and the Axis lacked the capacity to win that war due to their relative (to the US and the allies) lack of industrial capacity and manpower, as well as the fragile conditions of their supply chain. This page concentrates mostly on the naval war in the Pacific, but it speaks to the grim disparity that all the Axis powers faced.
 
Or, as I like to say - the atomic bomb didn't win the war, it ended the war. The war was already won, and the only remaining question was how large the butcher's bill was going to be.
 

They already had a rocket delivery system, and they were ahead in jet aircraft. Mix von Braun with those guys, and Germany would have been unstoppable in the late 1940s.

They didn't have a rocket delivery system until late 1944 - by which time they were already in deep trouble, barely able to sustain their existing forces and starting to be pinched by lack of petroleum and access to raw materials. (Germany's industrial output peaked in Q3 of 1944.) The same holds true of jet aircraft. While they were technologically ahead... their production capacity was starting to lag. And by the time they started figuring out how to use it effectively, the Allies had figured out how to partially counter it in flight and how to attack it at it's most vulnerable points in flight. (On top of the fuel and raw material problems.) They never could have survived to the late 1940's to become unstoppable.

Or, to put it another way, real history is very different than the urban legend version endlessly touted in a variety of poorly researched TV programs and books. The poor research incidentally is deliberate - breathless accounts of how close the Germans came and how they might have won sell by the truck load.

On a side note, I'm actually quite pleased with TFA - it and researchers acknowledge the truth, this is just a shovelful added to the already existing mountain of evidence that the Germans weren't anywhere close to the bomb... and that it's not clear they were even trying. The common consensus among those who have studied (as opposed to watching TV and reading urban legends and deliberate misinformation) the issue is that they were not.

If Halsey had been less of an idiot and left Admiral Lee behind with Task Force 34 during Leyte Gulf you would have seen modern battleships clashing with each other off Samar, an engagement that almost certainly would have been an ass raping of the Imperial Japanese Navy, barring alien intervention or extremely bad luck on the part of the USN.

As it was it only happened only three times in the entire war under what might be considered an equal footing, once in the Pacific (Washington vs. Kirishima off Guadalcanal) and twice in the Atlantic (Bismarck vs. Hood and Scharnhorst vs. Duke of York). There were other battles where battleships were involved (Surigao Strait and Bismarck's final battle) but they can't even charitably be described as fair engagements. Surigao involved a depleted Japanese force against an entire American battleline that outclassed them in every department while Bismarck was crippled before her last fight, unable to steam at speed or maneuver.

The battleship wasn't as useless as people would have you believe, nor was it Pearl Harbor that sealed its doom. The oft-repeated mantra is that the United States Navy was invested in the battleship and Pearl Harbor was a rude awakening; this doesn't survive even a casual examination of the historical record. The Two-Ocean Navy Act passed Congress in 1940, nearly 18 months before Pearl Harbor and it very deliberately recognized the supremacy of the aircraft carrier, both in number of ships ordered and the statements of the legislators who wrote it. The Japanese were more invested in the battleship than the USN, wasting their limited resources on two mega battleships that ultimately accomplished nothing, while deluding themselves into thinking that a single decisive battle like Tsushima would be enough to convince the United States to throw in the towel, a country that had seventeen times Japan's GDP and twice her population!

Incidentally, the turning point of the war didn't happen at Midway, as is often repeated, but rather it happened at Guadalcanal. Midway was a battle, Guadalcanal was a campaign, one which proved the Japanese were not equipped materially or psychologically to fight a long war. Guess which ship saved the day for the USN during the last decisive engagement? A battleship, USS Washington. :)

At least the USN got a return on investment for our expensive toys. I can't think of a single Japanese battleship that accomplished anything of note during the entire war. The few that they were willing to commit early in the war were destroyed off Guadalcanal with little to show for it; the rest they hoarded for a decisive battle that never came, ultimately being forced to commit them at Leyte Gulf, where they were so hopelessly outmatched that even Halsey's stupidity didn't give them enough breathing room to carry the day.

it was the OPPOSITE of isolationism which brought war to the US.

The United States was already effectively at war with Germany before the oil embargo against Japan. The US Navy had orders to sink German U-Boats on sight, we were giving weapons away to the British and Soviets (itself a violation of the obligations of a neutral country under international law), and were making plans for the manner in which we would wage open war against Germany once it broke out. Fire was traded between the US Navy and Kriegsmarine months before Pearl Harbor, in fact two American destroyers were torpedoed (one sunk) by U-Boats in October 1941.

The policy of the American Government at the time was to focus on Europe. Nobody in Washington wanted war with Japan, but they also weren't willing to accept a Japanese defeat and conquest of China. The oil embargo was a last ditch effort to bring them to the negotiation table. They opted for war, with a country that had seventeen times their GDP and twice the population . Had the United States not followed the Europe First policy it's quite probable that Japan would have been crushed by late 1943/early 1944. Japan going to war with the United States has to rank as one of the most boneheaded military decisions ever made in the history of the human race. Probably only equaled by Hitler's move to follow them into war against the sleeping giant.

If the same strokes of luck had happened for the Japanese instead of for the US, the balance of our entire carrier force would have been wiped out (which was what the Japanese plan was when they forced that action in the first place). Had that happened, at best it would have been years before we could have built enough replacements to make it a war again.

Less than a year actually... for every heavy carrier we had at Midway, we had four more already under construction. (The US would ultimately build 26 heavy carriers in WWII. We had more carriers in service in 1942 alone than the Japanese had during the entire war.) The ratios for cruisers, tin cans, submarines and oilers was even higher... for aircraft, unimaginably higher still. The main effect of a Japanese victory would have been for Japan to be more heavily entrenched in the Southern Pacific.
 
But that wouldn't have changed much in the long run.
 
WWII, like many wars in the industrial era, was essentially a war of attrition between two dueling economies - and in the case of US vs. Japan... Japan was screwed from day one. Their only hope was to win 'on points' (by making US victory too long or too costly), because they couldn't win long term on straight force-on-force. (The page Grim Economic Realities goes into this in some detail.) Even though it would take some years for all the effects to play out, they lost the war at Midway because they couldn't fight evenly force-on-force after that and thus couldn't force a win 'on points'.

Of course, every sentence says "citation needed" after it

Actually, its pretty accurate. Japan was hurting economically before the war even began. The USA stopped selling Japan raw materials, like steel and oil were cut off, and in response the Japanese extended the imperial drive into the resource rich pacific.

But even then you have to keep in mind that the industrial japan of world war II was nowhere near the industrial japan of today. The GDP of Japan was a fraction of that of the USA and to some extent the Japanese Navy headed into 1941 was built up over the years by accumulating a bunch of different classes of warships. On the other hand the USA of then was not the USA of today. Back in those days the USA was a protectionist industrial powerhouse, rather than a free trading banking state.

A great web site maps out the economic disparity between the two:

http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm

Some things are just amazing... like, just look at how many Essex class aircraft carriers, aircraft, and battleships the USA built. Everyone raves about the Japanese 70,000 ton Yamato, but there are some Navy fans out there that say the USS Iowa class could probably come out ahead in that fight, there were four of those versus two Yamatos.. and, if it had been a battleship war, and the Iowa couldn't do it, then the Montana would.

But as it was it was a carrier war. We build 25 Essex Class carriers, the Japanese a fraction of that. We build more than 300,000 aircraft, the Japanese a fraction of that. We have radar. The Japanese don't. We have self sealing fuel tanks. The Japanese don't.

The Japanese had no shot to win that war.

Oh, please... maybe the Japanese Navy had some active plans -- I'm sure the Pentagon has a plan for invading Mars somewhere too (military bureaucrats in search of something to do) -- but no one with any sense of logistics would seriously think the Japanese could have invaded the West Coast, including the Japanese themselves.

Take a look at http://www.combinedfleet.com/pearlops.htm -- even Hawaii was unrealistic. Crossing the rest of the Pacific (and presumably having to do Hawaii first)? Illusory.

At best, Kido Butai could have raided the West Coast a few times -- but that would have been pushing it. In the middle -- what really happened, with periodic submarines hassling the West Coast being able to cross undetected easier than a fast carrier task force (and get refueled via seaplane instead of slow oilers) and slip away afterwards.

The best excuse for an overly paranoid US security agency would be espionage by naturalized Japanese citizens. That at least was credible given Hawaii... but obviously, that can't be stretched to cover families and Nth generation citizens.

I don't think the Japanese were completely over matched. Especially at the beginning of the war. A lot of the reason the US did as well as it did was due to nothing more than luck. Certainly not all allied victories were, but there were some very decisive battles that were mostly luck. I don't think the US wanted to have to deal with such a industrious and determined enemy again in the foreseeable future. I certainly agree that surrender on Japans terms would keep them from looking like "spineless weenies". However not allowing Japan to do so, was much more disgraceful to such an admirable people and was a way to avoid allowing them to dress their wounds and try again.

Actually, the Japanese were completely outmatched. Yamamoto stated that he could "run wild for one year, eighteen months at most" but after that, he would not be able to garuntee anything. Just comparing industrial output, the disparity was sickening. By 1944, the US had 41.7% of TOTAL military output, worldwide. The US army and navy did as well as it did by weight of their numbers and the tenacity of forces.

Take a look at this site: http://www.combinedfleet.com/economic.htm I haven't had the time to verify the numbers (Pacific theatre was not my major) but they do overall jive with what I know, and I've seen the two authors that are quoted in more scholarly works, so I take what is presented here at face value.

The Japanese were quite headstrong, but by the time they were losing Iwo Jima, they knew that there was only really one end; their loss. You can see it in their strategic and tactical responses. One-way fleet sorties, utterly defense-oriented combat operations. Add to that the fact that their own cities were being bombed and burnt to the ground, even the people themselves were beginning to bend and crack.

I am not talking about a "perfect mirror" Let's say I can reflect 95% of incoming energy well you now need a system that's 20x as powerful. Can this be done?

No. The issue is that once part of the mirror is compromised, the entire mirror face will be lost. ANY imperfections will result in the complete destruction of the reflective surface. It was part of what I quoted in my previous post.

As to Masers you need to have 2 to 4 of them to cover each section of the ship.

I wouldn't be surprised if far more of them were installed.

Now let's place these things on a battle ship. Well a dumb kinetic bomb that is filled with paint can take them all out.

For one, you'd need a lot of paint to cover an entire battleship. For another, the "dumb kinetic bomb" won't get close enough.

It's not explosive so hitting it wit a laser is not going to do much.

It's quite explosive. What do you think is going to happen when the paint is suddenly superheated? BOOM.

Lasers sound cool but a rail / coil gun is much more useful at point defense

Are you kidding? Rail guns would make for lousy point defense. At a paltry Mach 10, plus launch time, plus time for aim (which ain't gonna happen for something designed to fire straight up), and only minor course correction abilities, rail guns just aren't designed for close-in combat. That's precisely what lasers/masers excel at!

As I said "unless there moving at slow speeds at which point you can just use gun powder to do that"

You can use gunpowder to fire a shell as far as 250 miles at speeds of ~Mach 10, with future enhancements expected to significantly increase that velocity? You're kidding me, right?

These are all low velocity rounds.
Note: Mach 10 is slow when you're talking about rail guns.

That really doesn't matter when you consider that rail guns are otherwise a non-functional weapon. Just because it is theoretically possible to launch these rounds faster doesn't mean that it's current feasible to do so. The "low velocity" you speak of is far in excess of any existing munitions. This link gives WWII muzzle velocities of around Mach 1.5.

The idea behind rail guns is you can take a 1lb iron dart and fire though 10 feet of carbon steel so you can then keep 20 tunes of said darts in less space and with less danger than you could other types of ammo.

Except that is not the type of rail gun that the Navy is deploying. They are deploying a more practical system that is different from the ideological concepts of the past. The Navy's design allows for greater range, lower duty cycle, longer rail life, and better combat effectivness. i.e. They're using rail technology to create more powerful battleship guns that take up less space, have a greater impact, and can be guided to their target.

" the ship was only able to carry such a system because it was a heavily overpowered Orion warship. (It carried several space shuttles up into space with it.)"

Your talking about sci-fi as if it real.

No, I'm talking about a scenario that *could* be real because it was based on *real* science. According to *real* science, the largest Orion is 8,000,000 tons (yes, tons, not pounds) using 1960's building technology. The REAL Orion designs are powerful enough to carry a cooling system sufficient to absorb megawatts of energy from REAL laser weapons. A missile cannot carry such a cooling system, because it doesn't have a REAL thrust-to-weight ratio sufficient to carry such a system. Unless we start using REAL Nuclear Thermal Rockets on them, that is.

It's real simple arithmetic. Read that web page and show me where its arithmetic is wrong.

Done. The web page is wrong because it assumes that only the Japanese need to bother about logistics. It lists in detail how the Japanese couldn't have brought in enough men/supplies to defeat the large American defense force there, while completely ignoring the possibility of a simple siege.

The page, while correct, is irrelevant to my suggestion of a naval siege, because it only demonstrates that the Empire couldn't have completed a rapid invasion in force. If one assumes, as that web page does, that a catastrophic loss at Midway had devastated the US Navy, then the eventual defeat of Hawaii would've been only a matter of time. Non-self-sufficient islands can never withstand naval superiority.

Such a scenario is quite similar to what would've happened if the Bismark had survived it's maiden voyage: effective blockade of England rendering it combat incapable after a few years. (By "effective", I mean not that every ship is intercepted, but enough shipping is lost to make continuance untenable)

The mechanics of a Pearl Harbor invasion