1 But are you open to the power of suggestion?

2 MACADEMI WASSHOI!!!

3 "Ruptured Ducks" Anything below the fold NSFW. "Jeep Carriers" The comic book series "Howard the Duck", not the movie The US Navy's jet powered seaplane. Humorous names for ships. (It was a space ship but I always liked "Frankly I blame the parents."

4

Of course, a different potential answer to this could have been "Go jump in a lake."

Just what kind of suggestions, about what, are you looking for.

5 I'm looking for topic ideas, mostly. 

(The "What If" post I was working on pretty much fell through, much to my consternation... too many variables in this one) 

6

Ah. Then for "What if's" this post may inspire you.

I guess I would phrase it this way: In what at least semi-plausible scenario could the ME-262 actually have substantially affected the outcome of WWII?

(My own opinion is "there are none" but others may not agree with that. So suppose we discount the general answer that "If the war in Europe were still going on in August of 1945, the first A-bomb would have been dropped on Berlin" and go from there.)

7 If Hitler had been convinced that the Sturmvogel variant was a dog & stopped meddling, and if Göring hadn't choked off jet research early on, and if they had concentrated on just a few types instead of the myriad Wunderwaffen, there might have been enough ME-262s to knock back the daylight bombers.

8 What if the characters of Hidamari Sketch and Gurren Lagann traded places?

What if Go Nagai had directed Neon Genesis Evangelion?

What if Satoshi Kon had directed Lucky Star?

What if Haruhi Suzumiya had been made a decade earlier, and Megumi Hayashibara had been cast in the lead role?

Would anyone survive?

9 If Hitler had been convinced...(snip)...there might have been enough ME-262s to knock back the daylight bombers.

Well, so much for that post.

10 Oops, sorry!

As penance: If Japan had a heavy bomber comparable to the B-29, could we have won the Pacific theater?

11 The thing that probably hurt Japanese air power the most was the lack of engine design and development and the ability to mass produce the complex multi bank air cooled and high horse power liquid cooled engines. If they could have built the equivalent of a B-29 they also could have built the equivalent of Hellcats, Corsairs,P-38s, and P-47s. To get the strategic use out of a B-29 would require a base at a range equivalent to what what we achieved. The capacity to build a B-29 would have had more effect on the war than the actual building of one in my guess.

12 Pork Chop Sandwiches

13 What would the Japanese have done with heavy bombers?

They turned out to be mos' unsuitable for attacking vessels at sea, despite pre-war claims to the contrary. And as far as supporting attack operations, there simply weren't any Pacific island targets that Japan failed to take because of on-land defenses (if we discount New Guinea, and that was just jungle attrition.)

The nastiest use of them would have been against US beachheads or airfields (not that Henderson Field would have been an easy target, but you wouldn't have to hit it a whole lot...)

If anything, the diversion of scarce pilots and manufacturing resources into heavy bombers probably would have weakened Japanese air assets overall, and the fuel situation in mid-1944 to the end of the war pretty much precluded large-scale bomber operations anyway.

Without the ability to get air bases within range of US centers of production (many of which were inconveniently located thousands of miles EAST of the West Coast), there's not really any suitable strategic bombing targets for Japan to hit.

Mentioning the fuel situation brings up a good "what if", I think. We know that the Japanese had next to no antisubmarine warfare units, despite having what were arguably the finest destroyers in the world. How much difference would it have made if the Japanese had pulled some of those destroyers back for convoy duty? (Could they have done it, though? The morale effect on the companies of those destroyers would have been disastrous - even if the Naval Staff had appreciated the need, the crews would not have taken it well...)

If Go Nagai had directed Evangelion, it would have been made of win and God, with an extra side helping of holy crap!

14

Late in the war, they could have used heavy bombers against Iwo, and in particular against the American ground operations on Luzon and Okinawa.

But by that point the war was essentially lost for Japan; it was just a matter of time and expense. I can't see a B-29 equivalent making any game-changing difference before that.