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Bomber B
Bomber B was a German military aircraft design competition organised just before the start of World War II to develop a second-generation high-speed bomber. The new designs would be a direct successor to the ''Schnellbomber'' philosophy, using high speed as its primary defence. But the Bomber B would also be a much larger and more capable platform, allowing it to carry bomb loads of an equivalent mass to any existing medium and heavy bomber airframe designs then being used or even considered by the Luftwaffe, but not quite matching the combat radius figures of the four-engined "heavies" of the Allied air forces. The winning airframe design was intended to form the backbone of the Luftwaffe bomber force, replacing the wide collection of semi-specialized twin-engined medium bomber designs intended for replacement, as many of them had origins going back as early as the mid-1930s, shortly after the Luftwaffe's founding. The Reich Air Ministry was so hopeful about the outcome that more modest projects were generally cancelled outright, so when the project eventually failed to deliver a working design, especially in the preference for a pair of high-output engines - meant to be capable of at least 1,500 kW (2,000 hp) each, if not more - to power the design, the Luftwaffe was left with hopelessly outdated aircraft.
==Background==
By the late 1930s, airframe construction methods had progressed to the point where airframes could be built to any required size, founded on the all-metal airframe design technologies pioneered by Hugo Junkers in 1915 and constantly improved upon for over two decades to follow - especially in Germany with aircraft like the Dornier Do X flying boat and the Junkers G 38 airliner, and the Soviet Union with the enormous ''Maksim Gorki'', the largest aircraft built anywhere in the 1930s.
However, powering such designs was a major challenge. Mid-1930s aero engines were limited to about 600 hp and the first 1000 hp engines were just entering the prototype stage - notably the Rolls-Royce Merlin and Daimler-Benz DB 601. But even the latest engines were limited in the sort of designs they could power; a twin-engine aircraft would have about 1,500 kW (2,000 hp) in total, the same power as a mid-war single engined fighter aircraft like the Hawker Typhoon or Republic P-47 Thunderbolt. Although using a larger number of engines was possible, and achieved in some airframe examples for both the United Kingdom and the Third Reich, the mass production by the aviation engine industries of both nations to build the numbers of engines needed to equip a large, four-engined heavy bomber fleet as the Americans were already starting to do was a serious problem. The first 1,500 kW output aircraft powerplants to be conceived anywhere would start their emergence within the United States during 1937, with the American Wright Aeronautical and Pratt & Whitney firms testing twin-row, eighteen-cylinder air cooled radial engine designs of at least 46 litres in displacement each, that would emerge as major factors in American air power during the war years.
The United States, confident in its ability to produce aviation engines, opted for four-engine designs with heavy defensive firepower, as seen in the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, with experimental designs like the Boeing XB-15 of some 45 meter wingspan; and the even larger, 64.6 meter wingspan and 72 tonne loaded weight Douglas XB-19 produced, solely as prototypes, to further explore large, strategic bomber designs for the United States military. The United Kingdom and Germany largely focused on twin-engine bombers with shorter range intended for a European war. The advantages of larger designs were evident, and both countries experimented with four-engine designs in the pre-war era, but the strain on the production capacity of each nations' aviation industries for airframes, and the engines to power them, was always a concern.
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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