>>33904
It seems they just fucked up the order of things with that U-boat. Build a couple, test them out, correct the design then give them to those inland firms to speed up manufacturing. This should have been the order no? The prototypes could have been built by them too, which also would allow maturing the "multi-stage production" practices.

>>33905
The thing with arms-race that it's a race. If one can't suppress the enemy with volume they have to win with qualitative advantage. Which Germans rarely had. The successes at the first phases of the war was based on the revolutionary usage of combined-arms. Panzers in themselves, or aircrafts in themselves weren't that great. Not to mention small arms and artillery pieces which were just common. Same on the seas: one can have sophisticated submarines but without air cover they can suck the D. But the application of superior operational practices can only hold until the enemy catches up and if by that time he isn't on his back, then it's too late.
So the Germans what really didn't have was the luxury of time. Competing against the world two and a half biggest economies just impossible and the longer it took the more impossible it got. It's kinda WWI again. It would have been needed a revolutionary approach to the beat them, finding something what makes economy and battlefields less relevant (leik media or something).