Yes, but they probably cheated on the emission tests even then.
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The flying wing designs are good for straight and level flying. The problems come when you have a human pilot, because it is easy to stall or nosedive because it has not got the long body or tail to stabilise it. But both of those bits are extra mass and extra drag. The plane was bigger than the wind tunnel test models, and it seemed possible according to the science of the day that a full size plane might not prove too skittish for a good pilot. Unfortunately for Horten and Northrop, and their pilots, they weren’t. These days, computer control means this is not a problem. Flying wings were good science at the time, and good science now.
The flying pancake / plate / ring-wing aircraft of the days were an attempt to make a low-drag aircraft. A lot of drag comes from the vortex shed by the wing-tip, and there were a lot of attempts to try and design an aircraft without a wingtip, so you would fool the air into not forming a vortex. However, without drag you don’t get lift, so if they had managed to make an aircraft that didn’t trail a vortex from the wing, then the thing would probably not fly. To be charitable, this was probably not proven back in 1940 or whenever, but it is not good science to go on making the same mistake.
Vapourware? I doubt it. I am sure the Hortens were making the best planes they could as fast as they could. It would be pain and grief for any real engineer to do anything else.
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Nazu UFO Commander? (Can’t post link, am at work 
)
From the title, I was expecting that it was built by secret Nazis.
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Is that what the little vertical fins at the wingtips of modern jetliners are for?
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Hmmmm… No. Laibach predates Rammstein and has a much more interesting history than Rammstein. Rammstein is fine, but just another electro-industrial metal band influenced by Laibach. Laibach’s last album was a soundtrack for a Slovenian (where they’re from) production of Thus Spake Zarathrustra.
Rammstein is fine… Laibach are legends!
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Pretty much all the soundtrack work that Laibach has done is Wagnerian. It’s kind of their whole thing, taking fascist, socialist, and nationalist imagery and putting that back out as art/music.
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Just as well we’ve left that sort of thing behind us, eh?
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their plane didn’t fly so good.
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I can’t believe that nobody has brought up the appearance of a plane obviously based on this in the third Indiana Jones movie!
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Meh, they weren’t very secret either.
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If you mean winglets, then yes, they are tinkering around with the same sort of thing. You can’t stop shedding the vortices but there are better and worse ways of doing it…
The other thing you can do is have swept-forward wings. This looks very wrong because we are used to looking at aircraft the other way around. It has stiffness problems, and gives similar stalling problems to the flying wing. But, as with the others, you can stabilise it with computers.
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To call one of the earliest attempts at jet aircraft vaporware is insincere. The Hortons had a history of very innovative gliders - which flew. Just because someone wants to survive a terrible war, and has work that may offer some chance to do so, does not mean their technology and effort is not legit.
Totally stolen from the Czech Tatra.
In fact Mitteleuropa was full of beetle-shaped cars in the mid-30s (Steyr 55, Adler Typ 10, Hanomag 2). God must have been inordinately fond of them.
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Here’s the theme music for that crazy vehicle.
I’d say Ford got away with it, just fine
But if they keep having production delays and overruns that keep this promising technology always 6 months out of reach until, phew, the war is over… then it was vaporware. Even if they did it before and after, this model was vaporware. Piece of vaporware, not ‘tech of vaporware’ or ‘people who only made vaporware’ - to read that that way might be missing/ accidentally changing the subject. And how could you agree if you’re on a different subject?
That certainly describes Nazi Germany’s designs towards the end of the war (on Hitler’s orders) for huge, impractical tanks that they didn’t have the resources to build. Meanwhile the Soviet Union built relatively cheap, good-enough tanks in overwhelming numbers.
From wherever J.B.S. Haldane is watching, he saw what you did there. 
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It wasn’t the design that made the Volkswagon Beetle innovative - it was that the car was rear-engine’d, and the motor was easy enough to repair that a moderately-competent weekend tinkerer could do it.
Admittedly, both Hans Ledwinka (Tatra Engineer) and Ferdinand Porsche (who formed Volkswagon partly at Hitler’s suggestion) copied a lot of each others’ ideas, but I think it was more a case of they stole from each other than VW stole from Tatra.
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