Pat Flannery wrote:

That's why the running board wings on the A9 weren't a problem in the
manned version...you weren't going to be landing.

Wrong. The initial design with the strakes was found to be
aerodynamically unstable, and thus more conventional wings were
added... along with studies for *less* conventional wings. it had
nothign to do with manueverability, but with extending glide range
while remaining stable.

"The most ambitious and, perhaps, delusional of the Nazi space schemes was a 1945
project for an orbital space station armed with a death ray, a huge space mirror.


Which seemed to exist *nowhere* except in the mind of some hack
journalist at "Life" magazine and his artist buddy. The description
faintly matches up with an idea published by oberth in the late 1920's,
but only faintly. The design as described is stunningly flawed and
unworkable; von braun's team would have figured it out in about 10
seconds. Von braun *did*, on the other hand, have full knowledge of
Oberths idea, which was vastly less flawed (but still flawed).


"Raumwaffe, 1946" is every bit as full of post-war bull**** as stories
about completed German nuclear bombs or supersonic Nazi flying saucers.
One should be careful not to take Amazing Stories uncritically.