Germany had built a few four engine bombers but they did not pursue strategic bombing the Western Allies did, the Russians didn't so much.

The He-177 would make more sense as it was supposed to be Germany "heavy" bomber, although in the event it mostly just became infamous for combusting in flight due to overheating engines.

Tk3997 said:

The He-177 would make more sense as it was supposed to be Germany "heavy" bomber, although in the event it mostly just became infamous for combusting in flight due to overheating engines.

Amusingly enough the Early B29s had the same rep. With the fun part of the engines being made most of magnesium. Wasn't til the 1950s that they fixed that.

Which is probably why Sara choose the good old stand by of the B17

Tashkent looks pretty upset but she chose the wrong bomber, the Petyelakov PE-8 is a pretty good equivalent to the B-17.

armory18 said:

Amusingly enough the Early B29s had the same rep. With the fun part of the engines being made most of magnesium. Wasn't til the 1950s that they fixed that.

Which is probably why Sara choose the good old stand by of the B17

The problems weren't comparable really, while the engines in the B-29 would go on to become workhorses with long lives with the kinks worked out and even in their somewhat rushed employment in WWII they were reliable enough for the B-29 (which was also a fundamentally sound air-frame) to conduct an effective bombing campaign over unprecedented distances.

The system on the He-177 though was on another level of unreliable and the entire aircraft was compromised from the start by ludicrous requirements. Namely the stupid Luftwaffe requirement that a heavy bomber be able to 'dive bomb'. In order to try and reduce drag and stress on the wings for this it was limited to "two" engines even though the payload and range requirements clearly called for something in the heavy bomber weight class. There were no engines powerful enough for the task at the time and none on the horizon... so they just took two fighter engines and welded them together and stuck them in a single nacelle as a "power unit".

That was bound to cause all manner of issues all on it's own as you basically doubled the number of things that could go wrong, but for bonus points the nacelle was incredibly poorly deisnged and the various systems of the kludged engines were crammed together in less then optimal ways for reliability as well. It's a bad sign when the nickname for an aircraft given by it's own crews is "Reich's lighter". As an even further bonus the airframe itself appears to have had issues as a number of the aircraft broke up in flight (albeit mostly while trying to do the aforementioned dive bombing nonsense).

All these problems also meant that an aircraft that started development in 1936 and was meant to be in full service in 1941 was only starting to enter limited use in 1943.

Air Force pilots had some songs about the conditions they flew under, a lot being NSFW. Folk singer Oscar Brand compiled them into a few albums.

Here's one about the B-17 Flying Fortress:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOKODvk1AgA