The other discovery was that the swept wing is much less efficient at generating lift than a straight wing. Another aspect of that was that the airflow along a swept wing significantly reduced the effects of the aircraft's controls.
The air flowed from the leading edge to the trailing edge as normal but also flowed spanwise along the wing causing the tips of the wings to stall. One was that if wings are swept, the airflow over the wings had two components, not one. What wasn't in the open literature was that a Russian, V Stroominsky had carried on with research into swept wings in the early 1940s and made some discoveries that Busemann had missed completely. It was of theoretical interest only since nobody could get up to speeds where the effect mattered. There was nothing secret about it, the work was published in open literature and everybody knew about it. The original work on swept wings was done by a German, Dr Alfred Busemann in around 1935. Now you know why the F-104 looks like that. By the way, one can get the same effect by havinga long fuselage and short, razor-thin wings. The sharper the sweepback, the longer the delay.
If the wing is swept back, the tips are kept clear of the shockwave longer so the sudden increase in drag is delayed. that causes a dramatic increase in drag and it gets worse as more and more of the wing becomes immersed in the shockwave. Eventually, the shockwave angle gets so acute that the shockwave itself touches the wingtips. At slow speeds, this is a straight line but as the aircraft gets faster, that line starts to form a V with the nose at the front and the shockwave angled backwards. Why swept wings and high power? In elementary terms (please remember I'm not an aviation engineer) there is a shockwave that stretches outwards from the nose. In addition the aircraft had to be equipped with a heavy armament and be easy to both manufacture and maintain in the field. These whales were (a) the use of a turbojet rated at over 4,400 pounds thrust, (b) the use of swept wings and (c) the use of an ejector seat. There were three primary requirements for this aircraft, these requirements were called "whales" by the USSR because it was recognized they presented an enormous challenge. One was for their production jet fighter. In 1944, the USSR established two specifications. The prototypes flew in 1946 and were installed in the Il-22 bomber in 1947. When work restarted in 1944 Lyulka was responsible for the production of the TR-1 turbojet engine that delivered 2,866 pounds of thrust. Development design continued but all actual production capacity was devoted to war production. When the Germans invaded Russian all that work came to a halt. Meanwhile, the Oovarov group were assembling a turboprop that could deliver 4,400 shp. By 1941, he had developed the RD-1 jet engine that delivered 1,100 pounds of thrust. That part was headed by Arkhip Mikhailovich Lyulka. That year, the group split into two parts, one of which developed turboprops, the other of which started work on turbojets. The prototypes of the GTU-3 were first test-flown in 1938. At that time, the primary focus was on turboprop engines and, in 1936, the group developed the 1,150 shp GTU-3 turboprop that was proposed as a powerplant for the TB-3 bomber. They set up a specialized gas turbine engine reserach group in 1926 and in 1930 the group was headed by V Oovarov. Stuart wrote:The Russians first started work on jets in the early 1920s.