So the Professor’s next project was perfecting another unfinished secret weapon from WWII, this time one that was apparently some kind of a German/Japanese cooperation: the infamous Kugelpanzer.
This one is the other extreme from the example set by the ‘Glocke’. The Glocke never existed, but is still surrounded by an amazing number of wild theories. In the Kugelpanzer’s case, there’s no doubt it really existed (in fact, it still exists in a museum), but there isn’t any truly convincing theory of how it came about and what it was supposed to be. It wasn’t in fact the only design for a spherical armored vehicle ever to show up on a drawing board, but apparently the only one of them to survive extermination by common sense before even reaching the prototype stage. Aside from the vehicle itself, captured by Soviet troops in the course of their 1945 invasion of Japanese-occupied Manchuria, but apparently originally built in Germany, there isn’t any other clue at all – no mention of it anywhere in any Japanese or German files has yet surfaced. My best guess is that the testing programme revealed the finished thing to be as useless as should have been immediately obvious from a first sketch, and the people responsible destroyed all the files to hide their embarrassment. XD
As for the Bose Automotive Suspension System, to the best of my knowledge, is somewhere in between the Glocke and the Kugelpanzer: surrounded by a modest amount of rumors but at least possibly really existing. Whether it’ll reach the market any sooner than the Glocke’s anti-gravity system is anybody’s guess. >_>
More on Thursday!