Editing Nazi Equipment (section)

== C3i Waffen ==

Not exactly their strongest area...

*'''Enigma:''' Enigma was a communications scheme based on a sophisticated but easy to use electromechanical encryption/decryption device resembling a cross between a typewriter and an odometer.  When used with proper procedures it was the one of the most secure means of communication available in the world for its time, offering effectively 76 bit encryption with 1920's technology in a device that was superior to anything the allies had.  SIGABA was comparably secure but far heavier and fragile, and the M-209 was far inferior in both ease of use and encryption strength (although it was still adequate).  However the combination of lax discipline, reuse of settings, and notes from a polish customs inspection of an enigma device resulted in the technology being reverse engineered and cryptographic attacks being discovered.  Only Kriegsmarine communications remained difficult to decrypt by the end of the war, due to their practice of using secret codebooks to further compress their messages prior to encryption. Has become known for being completely cracked by a British team led by a gay man, only for him to be arrested and almost chemically neutered before committing suicide. Because yes, back then potentially saving the lives of hundreds of thousands did not make up for liking the dick.

*'''Bombing Beams:''' Wouldn't you know it, the Instrument Landing System used today at pretty much every major airport was originally invented to 'land' bombs on London in the middle of the night when the lights are out.  By using narrow radio beams the Nazis could steer bombers to a precalculated drop point.  All the pilots had to do was maintain a certain speed and altitude, and then drop their bombs when the signal detector said they should... except when the British were fucking with them.  Towards the end they were fucking with them so hard German bomber pilots were landing at RAF bases believing they were in France.  When it actually worked, such as at Coventry, it was more accurate than daytime saturation bombing, with most bombs falling within 90 meters of the beam centerline.  This system is why Nazi bombing raids tended to less of a brief swarm like the allies used and more of a continuous bomb conveyor belt lasting most of the night; they would line up single file along the approach beam, and then after they hit the drop beam they'd change altitude, turn around, follow the beam back across the channel; no visibility needed.  The British figured this out and started using their television antennas (which had far greater power output) to mess with the system.  If the Nazis had continued to improve this technology with ECCM and built a lot more bombers instead of squandering money on Wunderwaffen, they probably would have won the Battle of Britain (even then, Göring would have found a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory).  

*'''Tank Radios:''' While today we take it for granted that any trooper anywhere in the galaxy could get a call from the emperor himself to execute order 66, this wasn't always the case.  Throughout the 1930's, all German armored vehicles had radios, while their opponents would typically only have a radio for the unit commander.  This was an enormous advantage for Nazi tank units that remained the case basically until America showed up.  The Nazis also had the Torn.Fu.d2, a backpack portable infantry radio comparable to the American SCR-300, although they didn't distribute them as widely as the Americans did.  This was an organizational thing; Germany dealt with communications by assigning a signals battalion to each division and delegating resources as needed, while the Americans always had radios at company level and sometimes had SCR-536 handy-talkies for individual platoons, the ideal being that every American officer's best ''weapon'' was their radioman.  The main problem the Germans had with radios was that lots of American soldiers were fluent in German (and German isn't that different from English to begin with).

*'''Zuse Z3''': Lo and behold, for you look at the very first freely programmable digital computer in the world. Completed by Mathematician and Electronics Engineer Conrad Zuse in 1941, it was kept in extreme secrecy, so much so that it was rarely put into use. The rare times it was used, its purpose was to calculate trajectories for V2 rockets. Zuse advocated for its use in the war effort, but the original (and at the time only) device was destroyed in an allied bombing raid in 1943. Zuse built an improved successor, the Z4, just before the war came to a close.  Although conditionally Turing complete, physically the Z3 was less advanced in implementation than its peers.  Zuse was not able to procure thermionic components (vacuum tubes were in critically short supply for radios and radars in Germany) and so had to rely on electromechanical relays from phone switching gear; in practical terms this meant that the Z3 ran much slower than even purpose built non-Turing complete calculators such as the Atanasoff-Berry or the Colossus.  The Z3 itself received little immediate recognition outside of Germany partly because of the American ENIAC computer; the strict secrecy Zuse worked under lead to the Z3 falling into relative obscurity, until the invalidation of the Sperry Rand patents in the 1970's, which hinged partly on Zuse's own patents which had been licensed to IBM as early as 1946 (FYI: you're reading this page on a computer today partly because those Sperry patents died; a year later the Altair 8800 began the long road of upstart Davids bringing down industry Goliaths).  Today, a replica of the Z3, built in the 70s (which the by then over 80 year old Zuse himself built alone and [[awesome|from memory]]) can be found in the German Museum in Munich. The only surviving (and probably only completed) Z4 computer was used as the main computer of the Mathematical Devision of the University of Zürich, Switzerland, until 1958, when it was sold to the German Museum in Munich where it remains to this day. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUXnhVrT4CI An example of the Z3 working can be viewed here. (Video in German, good automatic translated English subtitles are available)]
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[[Category:History]]