All very true. I also don't get ch1466's assertion that the Hurricane was so bad? The Hurricane was definitely slower than most rival fighters after
1940 but on the plus side it was extremely manouverable and could out turn a Spitfire Mk 1, for example, with ease. 14,000 + Hurricanes were built and
operated as front line aircraft until 1945.
By comparison, of the US types that were ordered by the RAF , the P-38 and P-39 were quickly rejected by the RAF and all orders cancelled. In the case
of the P-38 this was our own fault as we mysteriously decided to order them without superchargers, which rendered them impotent, the P-39 was rejected
outright and all RAF P-39's were forwarded to Russia. The P-40 was also rejected because of poor performance but it was felt sufficiently capable to
equip the North Africa squadrons who were 'only' going to face the Italians, allowing all Hurricane and Spitfire production to be directed to the
home defence squadrons who were up against the Luftwaffe. This hardly shows the Hurricane to be 'worse off' than the P-40, when the RAF were not
prepared to use it aganst the Germans.
Fastest piston fighter, page 4
privacy
reply posted on 25-1-2006 @ 07:54 PM by ch1466
HRIV,
If you want the old chestnut (Deighton, _Fighter_, page 94) the Me-109E had a turn radius of about 750ft. The Hurricane, 800. The Spitfire 880.
Now we have had a lot of data since then to suggest it was one of those 'it depends' conditions of altitude and airspeed (do we dewing the Auggie) more than anything.
But I prefer Browns comparisons in _Duels In The Sky_ whereby he characterizes the Me-109F as _the best_ fighter in the world, bar none, for 1941.
You have a completely revamped, strengthened and cleaned up airframe (no more WWI 'braces', no more open air tailwheels, larger wingtips). Even the controls were reharmonized and of course the 'slat problem' largely fixed by the F-3.
So that you have an airframe which is running on as much as 150 less HP than the Series 45 Merlin engined Mk.V Spit. Yet the airframe still has a good 10 and even 15mph topspeed edge over it (ca. 382mph vs. 374mph at 20,000ft, more as the altitude increases).
And the 109F will outclimb it at almost all altitudes (at the time 3,640fpm was unheard of in Europe, the Mk.V was almost 500fpm slower).
With B-2 fuel, the horsepower edge is even and the Me-109F becomes a 400mph airframe at 27,000ft.
The only thing that kept the Friedrich from truly excelling (and it crippled the entire series) was the armament package in that it lost the second cannon of the E and replaced it with a 15mm MG-151 variant while retaining the bb-gun MG17s. Mind you, you still got an increase of almost 300m/sec over the MG-FF, so harmonizing the weapons packages along the centerline was relatively simple. But you had no gyro sight to make it workable at range. Later F's got the 20mm IIRR but the 15mm was just too small to be a 'sure thing' fighter killer with 1-2 rounds.
Now, the reason I make this comparison is that if the 109F can readily beat the topline Brit air superioirity machine of the time. And the Spitfire was the master of the Hurricane (be honest now). What is there to be said?
Well lot's actually. The Hurricane is underpowered and has poor drag characteristics thanks to that wing/nacelle configuration. It has decent lift and fairly well balanced controls but this only makes it a 'chugger' in the form of sustained turns and fair agility (bank to bank in the horizontal plane) at _low_ speeds.
The Hurricane was playing with about 1,150hp (The Mk.XX's was clapped and it's turbo useless weight at the altitudes being fought at in the desert) at a time when the rest of the world was at 1,300 to 1,350. It's wing was too far forward and it's nose was poorly cowled. When you add the weight of the later IIb/c wing armament, even the types decent loading goes away and it just...sags. Which is why it was a fighter bomber. And so gave away yet another edge to the 'hun from sun' condition of not-it's-mission attention as much as positioning.
Good fighterpilots use control space through the dominance of planes. Out of plane maneuver requires high installed power because you are playing the vertical almost constantly. It also requires good power and drag characteristics because when you go down, to add God's G, you want to accelerate quickly.
Great fighter pilots use throttle to dominate TIME through the control of angles. Angles are a largely 2D fixed point of combat (though they can be entered into vertically) in which high transient performance outweighs chugger turn.
Given that it is also more snapshot oriented than tracking if you can shoot, you can kill this way.
And it doesn't matter what the threat type is because the first HMG rounds into the wingroot or engine ends the fight. The first /cannon/ (explosive) round almost anywhere into the airframe, ends the fight (A P-47D, flown by Johnson to ONE 30mm round through the rudder/vertical tail area and was instantly forced to retire, only the fact that the Germans wanted the B-17's that day saved him).
Marseilles was the preeminent snapshot artist of the war and he used both the native and transient (throttle-up/down) performance of the 109F to prove it.
>>
Hmm, not exactly speed related, but...
Never was a fan of the Hawk/Warhawk/Kittyhawk, even less of the Airacobra, but that is probably because one of the first things I learned about air combat was the Zeros ate P39 and P40 squadrons for lunch.
>>
The P-40 is an F4F for horizontal performance. A little bit cleaner, rather heavier, not quite as tight a turn, similar robustness and equal or slightly lower (period) armament package. Yet it has dive performance more akin to a Hellcat. So long as you keep your speed above 300mph and your altitude above 17,000ft, the Zero can't touch you. If you are advantaged bust his chops in the vertical. If you are not, unload and extend out, there will always be other days. Another thing that needs to be remembered was that the Japanese 'protected' their airfields by exploiting the range performance of their fighters. You sit in a 100` telephone booth for 4-5hrs and see how well YOU fight.
Facing a 109F, the P-40 has no vertical (up or down) edge and it weighs almost a third more (Kittyhawk, Warhawk is worse) while it's hp is roughly similar to the Hurricanes. What this means is that while the 109 may actually have a higher loading, it's slats and it's power make it vastly better in the BnZ or TnB fight which leaves the (Air Superiority dedicated) Kittyhawk little or no place to go. But at least it had the choice of starting height, skysearch attention and no bombs/tanks/cannon under the wing.
Zeros are kite fighters. All climb, all turn. But only so long as the speed ranges stay in the area 220-250mph. You increase the density altitude and they lose aspiration even as they lose lift and they cannot playup the speed because their rudder cannot defeat high power setting prop torque and so their nose gets loose and tends to wander independent of bank angle. VERY hard to be precise with your turn if you are fighting elevator/aileron to compensate for rudder loss. No nose control means losing all hope of being a good snapshot gun platform and the aircraft simply didn't carry enough rounds to be a spray and pray hose machine.
In this, the Zero is closer to a 109E for weapons system design point (too few cannon rounds, no reason for the cowl guns, primitive sights) but it doesn't have the latter airframes high speed/high altitude option to at least dictate the terms of the fight. Having traded it for pure vertical and range performance at PTO typical altitudes. If you look at a Zero and say 'hmmmm, fast biplane!' you have it's number completely.
The P-39 is a hotship below 8,000ft. At 10-12 or so it's still competitive. Beyond that and you're riding a flung brick. This is more or less as you would expect when you aren't shoving half a ton of high density steel around 'ahead of' your turn but have no turbo on a high wingloading. It's roll rate is fabulous and it's turn rate acceptable if you don't push it beyond what it can do (it has some high speed stall issues not unlike the 190s IIRR). It's clean and so accelerates reasonably well for it's weight.
What kills the P-39 is the lack of turbocharging (ironic considering the 37mm was originally a bomber killer), it's weapon package which is not only hefty but slow rated for the caliber mix (.30's are /worthless/ and the P-39 has as many as six of them!) and it's wingloading. That wing is just too damn small for higher altitudes, resulting in turn performance more like a late 109 (with too little power and no slats to play stall fighter). To which I would add that there was never any real justification for the cabdoor configuration, if you can't shift the dorsal inlet someplace else, you can sure as heck hinge the canopy one way or another. The pilot sits too low to have to look around foot wide frames at his 4 and 8 o'clock.
Obviously there are Russian pilots (Pokryshkin 48 of 59) who liked the P-39 a lot.
www.acepilots.com...
But then again, they were fighting at lawnmower heights and they had a lot of other considerations to take into account (working radios, rough field conditions, extremes of environment). To which I can only say, they never had a Mustang or a TBolt to compare with. And they never played with the RVD at 30,000ft where the bad guys /almost always/ had radar vectoring and height advantagement.
KPl.
If you want the old chestnut (Deighton, _Fighter_, page 94) the Me-109E had a turn radius of about 750ft. The Hurricane, 800. The Spitfire 880.
Now we have had a lot of data since then to suggest it was one of those 'it depends' conditions of altitude and airspeed (do we dewing the Auggie) more than anything.
But I prefer Browns comparisons in _Duels In The Sky_ whereby he characterizes the Me-109F as _the best_ fighter in the world, bar none, for 1941.
You have a completely revamped, strengthened and cleaned up airframe (no more WWI 'braces', no more open air tailwheels, larger wingtips). Even the controls were reharmonized and of course the 'slat problem' largely fixed by the F-3.
So that you have an airframe which is running on as much as 150 less HP than the Series 45 Merlin engined Mk.V Spit. Yet the airframe still has a good 10 and even 15mph topspeed edge over it (ca. 382mph vs. 374mph at 20,000ft, more as the altitude increases).
And the 109F will outclimb it at almost all altitudes (at the time 3,640fpm was unheard of in Europe, the Mk.V was almost 500fpm slower).
With B-2 fuel, the horsepower edge is even and the Me-109F becomes a 400mph airframe at 27,000ft.
The only thing that kept the Friedrich from truly excelling (and it crippled the entire series) was the armament package in that it lost the second cannon of the E and replaced it with a 15mm MG-151 variant while retaining the bb-gun MG17s. Mind you, you still got an increase of almost 300m/sec over the MG-FF, so harmonizing the weapons packages along the centerline was relatively simple. But you had no gyro sight to make it workable at range. Later F's got the 20mm IIRR but the 15mm was just too small to be a 'sure thing' fighter killer with 1-2 rounds.
Now, the reason I make this comparison is that if the 109F can readily beat the topline Brit air superioirity machine of the time. And the Spitfire was the master of the Hurricane (be honest now). What is there to be said?
Well lot's actually. The Hurricane is underpowered and has poor drag characteristics thanks to that wing/nacelle configuration. It has decent lift and fairly well balanced controls but this only makes it a 'chugger' in the form of sustained turns and fair agility (bank to bank in the horizontal plane) at _low_ speeds.
The Hurricane was playing with about 1,150hp (The Mk.XX's was clapped and it's turbo useless weight at the altitudes being fought at in the desert) at a time when the rest of the world was at 1,300 to 1,350. It's wing was too far forward and it's nose was poorly cowled. When you add the weight of the later IIb/c wing armament, even the types decent loading goes away and it just...sags. Which is why it was a fighter bomber. And so gave away yet another edge to the 'hun from sun' condition of not-it's-mission attention as much as positioning.
Good fighterpilots use control space through the dominance of planes. Out of plane maneuver requires high installed power because you are playing the vertical almost constantly. It also requires good power and drag characteristics because when you go down, to add God's G, you want to accelerate quickly.
Great fighter pilots use throttle to dominate TIME through the control of angles. Angles are a largely 2D fixed point of combat (though they can be entered into vertically) in which high transient performance outweighs chugger turn.
Given that it is also more snapshot oriented than tracking if you can shoot, you can kill this way.
And it doesn't matter what the threat type is because the first HMG rounds into the wingroot or engine ends the fight. The first /cannon/ (explosive) round almost anywhere into the airframe, ends the fight (A P-47D, flown by Johnson to ONE 30mm round through the rudder/vertical tail area and was instantly forced to retire, only the fact that the Germans wanted the B-17's that day saved him).
Marseilles was the preeminent snapshot artist of the war and he used both the native and transient (throttle-up/down) performance of the 109F to prove it.
>>
Hmm, not exactly speed related, but...
Never was a fan of the Hawk/Warhawk/Kittyhawk, even less of the Airacobra, but that is probably because one of the first things I learned about air combat was the Zeros ate P39 and P40 squadrons for lunch.
>>
The P-40 is an F4F for horizontal performance. A little bit cleaner, rather heavier, not quite as tight a turn, similar robustness and equal or slightly lower (period) armament package. Yet it has dive performance more akin to a Hellcat. So long as you keep your speed above 300mph and your altitude above 17,000ft, the Zero can't touch you. If you are advantaged bust his chops in the vertical. If you are not, unload and extend out, there will always be other days. Another thing that needs to be remembered was that the Japanese 'protected' their airfields by exploiting the range performance of their fighters. You sit in a 100` telephone booth for 4-5hrs and see how well YOU fight.
Facing a 109F, the P-40 has no vertical (up or down) edge and it weighs almost a third more (Kittyhawk, Warhawk is worse) while it's hp is roughly similar to the Hurricanes. What this means is that while the 109 may actually have a higher loading, it's slats and it's power make it vastly better in the BnZ or TnB fight which leaves the (Air Superiority dedicated) Kittyhawk little or no place to go. But at least it had the choice of starting height, skysearch attention and no bombs/tanks/cannon under the wing.
Zeros are kite fighters. All climb, all turn. But only so long as the speed ranges stay in the area 220-250mph. You increase the density altitude and they lose aspiration even as they lose lift and they cannot playup the speed because their rudder cannot defeat high power setting prop torque and so their nose gets loose and tends to wander independent of bank angle. VERY hard to be precise with your turn if you are fighting elevator/aileron to compensate for rudder loss. No nose control means losing all hope of being a good snapshot gun platform and the aircraft simply didn't carry enough rounds to be a spray and pray hose machine.
In this, the Zero is closer to a 109E for weapons system design point (too few cannon rounds, no reason for the cowl guns, primitive sights) but it doesn't have the latter airframes high speed/high altitude option to at least dictate the terms of the fight. Having traded it for pure vertical and range performance at PTO typical altitudes. If you look at a Zero and say 'hmmmm, fast biplane!' you have it's number completely.
The P-39 is a hotship below 8,000ft. At 10-12 or so it's still competitive. Beyond that and you're riding a flung brick. This is more or less as you would expect when you aren't shoving half a ton of high density steel around 'ahead of' your turn but have no turbo on a high wingloading. It's roll rate is fabulous and it's turn rate acceptable if you don't push it beyond what it can do (it has some high speed stall issues not unlike the 190s IIRR). It's clean and so accelerates reasonably well for it's weight.
What kills the P-39 is the lack of turbocharging (ironic considering the 37mm was originally a bomber killer), it's weapon package which is not only hefty but slow rated for the caliber mix (.30's are /worthless/ and the P-39 has as many as six of them!) and it's wingloading. That wing is just too damn small for higher altitudes, resulting in turn performance more like a late 109 (with too little power and no slats to play stall fighter). To which I would add that there was never any real justification for the cabdoor configuration, if you can't shift the dorsal inlet someplace else, you can sure as heck hinge the canopy one way or another. The pilot sits too low to have to look around foot wide frames at his 4 and 8 o'clock.
Obviously there are Russian pilots (Pokryshkin 48 of 59) who liked the P-39 a lot.
www.acepilots.com...
But then again, they were fighting at lawnmower heights and they had a lot of other considerations to take into account (working radios, rough field conditions, extremes of environment). To which I can only say, they never had a Mustang or a TBolt to compare with. And they never played with the RVD at 30,000ft where the bad guys /almost always/ had radar vectoring and height advantagement.
KPl.
reply posted on 26-1-2006 @ 08:59 AM by ch1466
Howlrunner,
I am aware of when the Me-109F was considered top of the dogpile. And of when the 109E fought in BOB.
I am aware of when the Me-109F was considered top of the dogpile. And of when the 109E fought in BOB.
Originally posted by waynos
Me-109E had a turn radius of about 750ft. The Hurricane, 800. The Spitfire 880.
>>
This statement, for a start, is wrong. Plain and simple. Your belief in the superiority of the 109 is quite startling given that, by 1942, it was considered overdeveloped and due for replacement by dint of the fact that successive increases in power and weight had shot the handling to pieces!
>>
The G-2 was still more or less a decent aircraft though the advent of the 13mm cowl guns to go along with the DB-605 would soon ruin it (as would the further additin of the 20mm underwing 'Kanoneboote' pods necessary for bomber killing).
But that's just it. The Gustavs are not the Freidrich.
>>
The Luftwaffe was forced to carry on with the 109 because there was nothing else. Hardly sounds like a 'superior' fighter does it.
>>
I believe I made firm mention of periodicity as an argument for breaking down the 'best of the best' by historical period. Surely I did.
The 109 was a machine that saw it's best years in Spain (vs. Ratas and Chaikas) was fuel beggared as much as outclassed by 1940 in both France and over Britain. But had a second brief twilight period of greateness in 1941 on both the Coast (Snicker, /now/ who fights with one eye on the gas guage?) and in Russia and the Desert. 1942 belonged to the FW. And from there on out, the 109 is outclassed in all areas by /someone/.
Again, something I made pretty clear.
>>
Wing loading rose to over 40lb/sq.ft while the Spitfire V was at 27lb/sq.ft, rising to 30lb/sq.ft in the Mk IX, a huge difference that also meant there was NO WAY a 109 could out turn a Spitfire.
>>
Slats that work bubba. Along with a lot more power. The Mk.IX has a Series 60 Merlin and that makes the power race about even. As you state later, it has equal or better wingloading (though not significantly with the Freidrich as it is with the Gustav). It also has the beginnings of proper armament and sights and that takes things further. The 109 was always a CF of knobbly bits, protrusions and bulges. This made it a bit of a drag pig UNTIL the 109F. With the 109G5 and onwards, everything that they had got right (retractable tailwheel for instance) was instantly screwed up again. When you add this to the weight of the engine, armament package and the high altitude mods, the airframe was destroyed as weight went up by 20% but installed power by only about 10.
Heck, even the /paint/ was a factor in it's 'bigger pigment balls means more surface (friction) drag' deleterious performance.
>>
I have heard Luftwaffe pilots say as much, for example Adolf Galland on the 'Battle of Britain' region 2 DVD additional documentary feature; "you would never try to out turn a Spitfire in a fight, if you kept going round in a circle he would always get you" . Maybe he was lying?
>>
In BOB, yes. Because the 109 could fight faster and hold a tighter turn at speed. The reality however was that you could bend the wings off an Emil and everyone knew it (literally, the first signs of spar failure were drooping turn rate as the airfoil no longer cut the smae AOA). OTOH, twice round a circle over SE England and you're going home or swimming. Whereas slashing passes could be made good on the zoom and _who cares_ if the threat survives, so long as it's effectively stiff armed. Because you are bombing the crap out of his airfield support structure and the morons in Fighter Command are doing nothing to change this.
>>
Also Here is something I have just copied out from an RAE comparative flight test between the Spitfire XIV and Bf 109G. The comparison was just one of many carried out during the war taking advantage of captured aircraft. The salient points only, of course.
>>
Well /duhhh/. You're looking at a fighter with upwards of 2,040 horsepower in the series 65 Griffon as well as a completely redesigned airframe (tail and wings) rather than the 'Mk.VIII mod' as is often asserted.
Yet the fact remains that while the Mk.IX was 'almost' as sweet as the Mk.V in terms of overall handling, the Mk.XIV was a monster in all axes that had to be whipped around corners with ten different kinds of rudder/aileron throws to keep it from (pro torq) whipping over or (anti-torque) skidding out of the turn. No harmony was left, it was all speed and max rate performance until you were inside his turn or above his fight plane and could gun him like a strafe rag, wings level.
www.spitfireperformance.com...
www.spitfireperformance.com...
www.supermarine-spitfire.co.uk...
If you want a fair comparison with that airframe then you need to go to a late model Corsair which should tell you a lot about how much, 'too much', power can do to a small fighter as nobody would willingly admit to the type being that heavy handed. But it is.
>>
Turning Circle The Spitfire easily (my emphasis) out turns the 109 in either direction
rate of roll the Spitfire rolls much more quickly both with and against engine torque
conclusion The Spitfire is superior to the 109 in every respect except initial dive speed which adavantage is quickly closed by the Spitfire if the dive is held
>>
A Mk.IX could beat the Freydrich, what is the point in illustrating what a variant almost a year and a half later in evolution could do? It sounds an awful lot like Brit Inferiority Complex accidently tripped the breaker here Waynos. Which is strange because I would be the first to admit that almost the entire range of U.S. Naval Fighters were inferior to anything in the ETO. The P-51 was a cruise-control platform not half as maneuverable or rapid-accelerating as is it is often accredited (the same engine as the Mk.IX in an airframe as much as /5,000/ pounds heavier!). The P-38 lost whatever chance it had when some nutjob in a Spit mistook a C-54 for an FW-200. The P-47 was short legged and awfully heavy handed in pitch. The list goes on and on for most U.S. fighters in /some area or timeframe/.
That said, no less a person than Eric Brown freely admitted that NONE of the German examples tested at RAE were ever run with boost (they simply didn't have the means to produce the chemicals) and so, for instance, he couldn't get the top 20% out of the Ta-152 when he flew it and had to 'sounds about right' guesstimate performance based on how close he got without them. 20% is an awful lot when it comes to climb rate and topend.
And in _DITS_ he compares the Hurricane to both Allied and German fighters and it routinely comes out the loser (I think it beat the Martlet/Wildcat but I don't know which variant.).
>>
Turning Circle The Spitfire easily (my emphasis) out turns the 109 in either direction.
>>
If it doesn't have altitude and airspeed combinants attached, it's pointless. If the Spitfire XIV outturns the Me-109G at all altitudes, it's pretty much proof positive that the 109G is of an earlier generation (if not 2 or 3). Test an Me-109F against an early FW-190A3 and /then/ see the comparitive differences in a dissimilar style of fighter as much as 1 generation change in technologic approach. Now realize that while the 109F could hold it's own at medium/high altitudes in the horizontal and actually had /better/ high speed capabilities (no snap stall) in the vertical, it would not have as good a chance against the Mk.IX as the FW (especially the period A4 or A5) would at low to medium altitudes. Because the Tank and Mitchell products were again at parity by their very dissimilarity while everything that the 109F did well, the Mk.IX matched or bettered.
>>
Rate of roll the Spitfire rolls much more quickly both with and against engine torque
>>
At what power setting? There is a reason why all the online people use the 109 as a high altitude stall fighter because they can flick it into and out of tracking shots with the correct applications of power and rudder trim. Almost like magic. Before using all that POWER to take their narrow behinds up and away or otherwise (accelerate) from the existing fight condition to a new one.
>>
conclusion The Spitfire is superior to the 109 in every respect except initial dive speed which adavantage is quickly closed by the Spitfire if the dive is held
>>
The sadness here being yet another 'well knowner' that you are blatantly ignoring. The Spitfire and the Me-109 have similar ranges. Because they were originally both designed as light PDI aircraft not longrange OCA/escort planes. Combat radius being measured in minutes, about 60 for the 109 or 90 with a centerline tank and roughly 20 minutes more for the Spit (at least before the thirsty Griffon). Thus you HAVE TO compare the Gustav (or Kurfust to be completely fair) with the Mk.XIV because it's hard to get the two together in any other definitive way once 1942 rolls on and it's all Eastern Front + Reich's Defense (France is a yielded void of German air supremacy and the Low Countries are hard to reach). Until after we come back onto the Continent in 1944. British Mk.IX's in the crucial 1943 period were little more than recovery escorts, they had to push hard to get to a Paris/Brussels radial arc terminator.
>>
Both these aircraft are further developed from the ones you mentioned with highter gross weight, installed power and wing loadings but the comparison stands up due to the turning circle comparison not even being close despite your claim that it had a 130ft advantage over the Spitfire!
>>
You know better than to compare a Mk.I or II Spit with a Mk.XIV. Just as you /should/ know better than to compare an Me-109F with DB-601E with an Me-109G with DB-605 since /everyone knows/ that the 109G was the point where the plateau fell off a grand canyon cliff.
Just on 'how much can we put ahead of the CG' factor-
DB-601 1,322lbs vs. DB-605 1,652lbs.
Merlin 1,636lbs vs. Griffon 1,975lbs.
The reality of the fact being that it's how well your airfoil is set up to take what the power loading can give you (CG and P Factor vs. rated G at the roots), how high your elevator loads (for a given airspeed) are in holding it. And how much added tip twist/washout or slats effect the basic L@D equation. Put another way, an F-15 has about a 1.4:1 T/Wr when lightly loaded. It has about a 60lbs:squarefoot wing loading. Compared to an F-16 which has about a 1.2:1 and upwards of 85lbs:squarefoot. At low and medium altitudes and subsonic, the F-16 will cut a tighter turn. Why, if wingloading is all that matters?
Ans: Because the F-16 has marvels of 'blackart' Vortice Flow Dynamics coming off that LERX and a much more variably optimizable wing surface allied to a reasonable static margin (though I believe the F-15 is actually within 2-3% around 25% maximum displacement).
All of which combine together with lower mass overall to make the turn _and the turn reversal_ happen, competitively.
>>
This being so wrong you then have to wonder about the rest of your claims, interestingly, your statistical demolition job on the Hurricane is completely at odds with the historical fact that it served successfully throughout the war, in the front line, and was by a large margin the dominant RAF fighter during the Battle of Britain, where, by your calculations, they should have been decimated by the far superior Bf.109's?
>>
The Hurricane was butchered wherever it encountered a truly 1940's fighter with it's inherently 1930's engineering. The Hurricane was /converted/ to intruder and like 'hurribomber' roles which only added yet more weight to an already sagging airframe BECAUSE we understood this. This increased the performance disparity to the point where it was no longer even close to being competitive by the time the Mk.IIb/c rolled around.
Suck it up, it did what it had to when it had to, against bombers, over friendly territory where you could at least grab most of the pilots back up. It doesn't need a greater mythology than that.
>>
The thing about the Hurricane was, it didn't just destroy more enemy aircraft than the Spitfire, the actual quote is .....destroyed more enemy aircraft during the Battle of Britain than all other defences combined . Quite remarkable, for such a dud.
>>
And one Do-17 had over 7,000 .303 rounds shot at it by six Spitfires and still flew home because the DeWilde just wasn't enough and Britain's armament ministry got all snooty over the 20mm because it had a 'French Feed'.
Two years later they were essentially using that very feed, because the one they designed to replace it jammed every 5th-7th round. How many Spits had working cannons in BOB?
Oh yeah.
Of course _by 1941_, Germans were knee deep in Russia instead of sipping English tea like they should have (whether that be in High Street or Alexandria's Windsor I leave up to you) if they wanted to avoid Hitler's two front economic disaster. The Brits didn't win BOB, the Germans lost. Considering the number of heavy guns you had to site around the key 11 Grp and Industrial targets vs. those which you /wasted/ on London. Considering the Me-109 couldn't stay with the bombers as they made their way up-Thames. Considering the /weather/ on several key days. Considering the state of radar technology. Considering the utter stupidity of the Norwegian basing scheme. Considering the lack of correct (even PreWar mapped) data on 'just exactly which are the CC airfields anyway?'.
It's kinda pointless to say much about a 1940 fighter based on 1937 engineering. In light of an aircraft which _did not exist_ at the time BOB was fought. You cannot compare apples with oranges for rottenness and who was the better grower until you acknowledge the time they were picked vs. the time they were dumped off the back of the truck.
These are the numbers you want-
www.csd.uwo.ca...
Note, that with less than half the total numbers available on any given day (38%), the Spitfire was making a respectable 1.2:1 vs. 1.7:1 kill ratio and that by the critical months of September/October, the Spitfire loss rate was only 2/3rds that of the Hurricane. This despite the fact that they were both within 5% of each other's 109 total kills and 15% of each other' total kills overall (i.e. no penalty for having one's guns pointed at the bomber and one's tail at the escorts).
So here too, YOU CANNOT measure the performance of an unequal force, unequally deployed, in a complex scenario as a justification for ONE aircraft's pride of place. Anymore than you can take 1v.1 in a tardisian timelessness. Because where single combat is too pure relative to single aircraft performance and pilot skills without a technology modifier. Group combat inevitably comes down to who has more to lose as a function of situational conditions.
>>
edit; I just want to add a footnote, out of interest. Having glanced at the comparative report for the F6F-5 and F4U-1D against the A6M5 Zeke I noticed that the first line of the 'conclusion' says *DO NOT DOGFIGHT WITH THE ZEKE 52!*.
>>
Nobody dogfought with the Zero nor with the Hayabusa which it was more often than not mistaken. Spitfires sent to Burma made this mistake and had their heads handed to them despite being nominally the 'best allied fighter in the world' at that time and nominally (on paper) easily the match of the Japanese aircraft. OTOH, the Zeke 52 was exactly what the 109G was: an overmuscled, overweight, /tired/ design that simply could not compete after they strengthened it for 460mph dives (we just went to 500-550) and added armor and the new weapons package (3X 12.7 and 2X 20mm IIRC). If you want to play fighter kite, and IF the enemy is willing to stay in your turn circle and airspeed range, you want a good ol' fashioned Type 21/22. No Hamp, No Zeke-5.
And I will crawl into the cockpit of a Bearcat or Corsair and hand you your head anyway. Because I will use double attack (tap-bounce) theory in which the lightweight fighter kite is going to break for number 1. Be down to zero airspeed for #2 and _die_ at the hands of my wingman. Meanwhile IT'S wingman is going to be looking for trouble and wondering why it can't keep up long enough to find any. Even horizontal, right on the deck. Because the installed power disparity is that bad.
But those same aircraft will in turn be completely outclassed by the late war P-47M and Spitfire XIVe at altitude.
Until you try to fly 900 miles with a 500 or 1,000lb bomb and two tanks, overwater.
It's always in the details.
KPl.
LINK-
Best Of The Breed (seek and ye shall find a turn circle datum more pleasing to your national preferences...;-)
www.geocities.com...
reply posted on 27-1-2006 @ 05:01 AM by buckaroo
Originally posted by HowlrunnerIV
ch, or KPI, whichever you prefer...
Your posts here have become nothing more than an anti-British tirade. Anti-British products, anti-British leaders, anti-British anything. It seems that you are the world's greatest armchair general, continually telling us all exactly where the political and military leaders of history went wrong...and always bringing in every red herring you can catch in your incredibly wide net.
What does range have to do with dive speed?
Answer: Nothing. Just one more of your red herrings...
Waynos may be a Brit and proud of it, I'm an Aussie and even prouder of it, suggest you check who you're debating with in the future.
So, the government of Great Britian should have let London burn and simply told the people that defending them was, well, inefficient under the terms of economic rationalism?
Clearly you come from a family, people and nation that have never sustained a long-term home front casualty list...
Is it just that Winston's command of the King's English was so far in excess of your own that leads you to denigrate him so much?
Oh, right, you were winning VN when you left...Try another one, statistics don't make a reality, they're just numbers and numbers only tell half a story. You had ten years to make a difference in VN and you did nothing except to exacerbate the problems, guaranteeing your own defeat.
The RN had the greatest force of destroyers on earth in 1939/40, it had the largest force of cruisers, it had KGV battlewagons going into commission, it had MTB and MTG boats, it had carriers and unlike the Germans on D-Day, it had the numbers, even if the RAF lost the battle, to do real damage.
Malta is no comparison, days of unrelenting aerial attacks on a force with no enemy in sight, not the english Channel full of comandeered barges and small ships wallowing across the Channel in an effort to put a non-amphibious force on a hostile shore. The Germans had no experience in the kind of combined ops required to invade across the Channel, Norway was a campaign on the fly against unprepared forces, the Brits had already successfully landed and evacuated three expeditionary forces by Adlertag. the Germans were hoping to "reverse-engineer" Dunkirk.
I agree , the royal navy would have significantly posed a threat to the germans the luftwaffe had at that time a poor to say the least record against the royal navy,39 RN destroyers were present at the evacuation at dunkirk,a quick search indicates that just 6 were sunk , 6 with almost total air supiriority against ships in shallow water desperate to help the thousands of stranded BEF troops , sitting ducks for the mighty luftwaffe, not good strike rate? Im not saying that the RN would have been able to deploy all of its regional assets at once but as was the conclusion of the sandhurst wargames of 1974 the German invasion force would surely have been eventually been cut off from resupply.
Any German invasion would have been too dependant on the Luftwaffe they would have to have been evey where winning every thing acting as air
support for the army , suppressing the RN ,preventing British Reinforcements from getting to the landing sites dealing with any remaining RAF units , they would have been overwhelmed.they would have had to win every thing where as if just a few of the home fleet ships of the RN had got amongst the poorly equiped amphibious fleet they would have been mullared, surely that cant be denied?
Anyhoo I thought this thread was supposed to be about piston aircraft why does that obviously anti british kpi keep bringing up other stuff. the victor should reserve the right to look back on their victory however they want too
[edit on 27-1-2006 by buckaroo]
[edit on 27-1-2006 by buckaroo]
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