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Subject: First critical element of WW-II fighter plane effectivness?
45-Shooter    1/18/2013 9:22:46 PM
Given that the "typical" WW-II Single engine fighter could be spotted at 1-2 miles, depending on aspect, about half the time, I propose that the smaller the plane, the more effective it will be! Sort of a semi-stealth solution to the "Spotting" problem?
 
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Schemer       1/19/2013 2:33:03 AM
I think this is generalizing things to much.
You need the aircraft to perform a mission, task effectiveness is based on how well it can do that.
 
I would look at adaptability, in combination with availability. 
Can an aircraft perform multiple tasks thus giving you a multi-role capability?
If this aircraft is also available in sufficient numbers you have a winner even if its not the best at every task.
 
For most of ww2 you had to do the job with the aircraft that's available. This means you'll see aircraft pressed into
a role that is not optimal. If the aircraft can still perform this task sufficiently its an effective fighter.
 
 
 
 
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oldbutnotwise       1/19/2013 11:44:50 AM
Dont bite, its shooter trying to reintroduce his impractical, impossible and unbuildable bat plane
 
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45-Shooter       1/21/2013 4:44:30 PM

I think this is generalizing things to much.
You need the aircraft to perform a mission, task effectiveness is based on how well it can do that.
I would look at adaptability, in combination with availability. 
Can an aircraft perform multiple tasks thus giving you a multi-role capability?
If this aircraft is also available in sufficient numbers you have a winner even if its not the best at every task.
For most of ww2 you had to do the job with the aircraft that's available. This means you'll see aircraft pressed into
a role that is not optimal. If the aircraft can still perform this task sufficiently its an effective fighter.

Are you saying that a "Fighter Plane" has to be able to perform multiple missions in order for it to be a great fighter plane?
 
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45-Shooter       1/21/2013 4:48:29 PM

Dont bite, its shooter trying to reintroduce his impractical, impossible and unbuildable bat plane 
NO, I was trying to start an argument about the size of a fighter plane being important as relating to it's primary mission as a destroyer of other aircraft in the pre-radar/missile era. The prime reason being the undeniable effect or efficiancy of the Me-109 as the single greatest destroyer of enemy AC the world has ever seen.
 
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Schemer       1/21/2013 4:57:00 PM
I'm saying that especially during ww2 aircraft needed to adapt to different missions.
This is still true and the more missions and aircraft can perform the more flexible it is.
 
You can check for yourself how many different roles aircraft were pressed into and how some aircraft adapted easier then others.
 
Mostly your original statement is generalizing things to much there are many more factors which determine aircraft effectiveness. You will also find that these factors tend to change over time depending on overall strategy.
 
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45-Shooter       1/22/2013 1:06:06 AM

I'm saying that especially during ww2 aircraft needed to adapt to different missions.
This is still true and the more missions and aircraft can perform the more flexible it is.
You can check for yourself how many different roles aircraft were pressed into and how some aircraft adapted easier then others.
Mostly your original statement is generalizing things to much there are many more factors which determine aircraft effectiveness. You will also find that these factors tend to change over time depending on overall strategy.

I do not dispute any of this. I was trying to separate out of all of those factors the single idea that smaller size makes a fighter plane more effective because it is harder to see comming and most, 80-93%, shoot downs involved the target not knowing he is under attack until it is too late!

 
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oldbutnotwise       1/22/2013 3:34:48 AM
but size is a factor of role, make the wings smaller you lose lift and therefore performance, make the engine smaller and you lose power, make the plane smaller you lose strength no aircraft of the period was made intentionally large in fact theypretty much were bult round the engine as in most cases this was the limiting factor, and dont start with your rubbish about smaller engines as they wernt available  so is a non argument.
 
if you make an airframe too small it limits your development (see me 109) make it too big and you end up with a US plane
 
If approximately 80% of air combat is the victim not seeing the attacker and that the Corsair,p47,P38 and Hellcat racked up such large kills it would look like the frontal area is not that important
oh and keeping the size down also helps the aerodynamics
 
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Belisarius1234    OBNW   1/22/2013 8:48:36 AM
Small frontal area reduces parasitic onset and reduces overall drag in general.
 
If the designers, then, knew what we know now, the radial-engined air-cooled ICE-powered fighters would have been designed with jet tunnels for the engines' air-cooled efficiencies so that slipstream inside the tunnel would have helped. This is HOW the corn-cob Pratts were designed to work and would have eventually worked had not the jet and  turbo-prop not killed them.
 
The various national aircraft designers had some handicaps.
 
The Germans had superb liquid-cooled ICE engines but those were HEAVY. So were their first auto-cannons. Their airframe design was exceptionally poor. Their planes were under-built for the weights they massed. It's almost a uniform certainty that except for Heinkel and Arado, the tail designs on the German aircraft for directional stability were simply awful. On the plus side, the Germans had the best Human-factors engineering for pilot work-load and the best automatic-engine management systems in the world. Their radial air-cooled engines were competent designs on par with the French, but were much better made. Those air-cooled engines, as the case with the Daimlers were heavy for their type.
 
The French had some decent aircraft designers who worked for Morane Saulnier and Dewoitine, so those companies produced average to good fighters, but as a general rule, the French aircraft designers, such as Marcel Bloch (the man who would later become Dassault) were mostly followers, tech thieves, and not innovators. French manufacturing methods were out of date, the aircraft manufacturing quality extremely poor,  and the aircraft manufacturers corrupt thieves, who ill-served the French people.  Engine-tech was average with poor watts per kilogram ratios for the Gnome-Rhone radials. Hispano-Suiza was a bright spot for the French, with both a superb .78 caliber auto-cannon (the famous moteur-cannon HS-404 20mm) and a decent Hispano Suiza 12K-Y series of V-12 LC ICE engines that could have served the French in the role, as the Merlin served the British. Poor manufacturing methods and general laxness in quality control handicapped whatever little good the French aircraft designers produced. There isn't much else good you can say about those incompetents.
 
The Italians produced outstanding aircraft structures. That is the first thing you notice about their designs. As a general rule, the Italians over-designed and over-engineered their airframes to produce over-weight, too complex, difficult to manufacture, but beautiful aircraft. Their aircraft engines (radials due to a proper, but ill-timed engineering choice in a general re-armament cycle) were licensed and underdeveloped licensed copies of British, American and French designs. The designs they were able to acquire were low watts/kilogram ratio designs that were out of date, so they were unable to catch up with the American and British later designs. hence we see three-engine bombers and transports, as well as underpowered fighters. The Italians would turn to German engines, to produce some small quantities of aircraft that show how truly outstanding their aerodynamacists were. Too little, too late. Like the British, the Italians knew how to design an air-breather circuit. They knew how to design a constant speed propeller, (something the British, the Germans, and the French did not know how to do.) Their aircraft armament of choice, the Browning machine gun, designed to the Vickers pattern was mediocre, because the BREDA engineers depowered the cartridge, but aside from these qualities, and an outdated manufacturing base? They're much better, overall, than the French.                           
 
(next post)
 
 
 
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Belisarius1234    OBNW   1/22/2013 9:16:30 AM
The British, to put it bluntly, were world leaders in aircraft engine design in liquid cooled ICE engines, but they squandered so much of that major edge in execution. They were also leaders in supercharger aspiration, and breather circuit design in 1938, though the Germans and Americans overtook them by 1943. Their manufacturing quality and execution of their superb aero-engine engineering was poor. Unable to make tolerance fits due to an incompetent predilection to hand-fit and hand-finish close tolerance pieces of an engine, this manufacturing deficiency almost cost the British the war, when Rolls Royce screwed up Merlin production and needed Americans (Canada- via Ford, later PACKARD) to bail them out.   
 
British aircraft designers, in the airframe department, were competent, but just. I still don't know how abominations, such as the Hawker Hurricane, made it into production. Even the Spitfire, that remarkable Mitchell designed plane was over designed in the fuselage and badly designed as to aircraft cockpit layout to the point of pilot-workload befuddlement. I thought Americans were bad with how they laid an aircraft control system out! 
 
The British did produce a few good aircraft types and had sense enough to stick by them, Wellington, Beaufighter, Lancaster, Spitfire, Mosquito. The rest of their JUNK had no business being in the air with decent aircraft-especially the Hawkers-Hurricane, Tempest and Typhoon. If the P-40 (the Curtiss P-40?!?) is a better built and performing plane than those three, then you are in trouble!   
 
British choice for aircraft armament was poor initially. The Browning .303 machine gun was adequate in the 1920s, but by 1938, the weapon of choice should have been the auto-cannon.   
 
Fortunately the British gun-makers were not as backward as their aircraft manufacturers. They could steal the Hispano Suiza HS-404 and make it work. (Unlike Colt and GM which screwed their versions of the gun up.)
 
All in all a mixed technological bag. The RAF, I should mention, muffed the jet engine completely during the war. The Germans, with an equally incompetent air service leadership at least managed to get the Jumos and the Ohains into service. 
 
Shrug. The British muddled through with superb engineering and botched execution. The ONLY aircraft companies who seemed to have a clue were AVRO, Bristol, and DeHavilland. 
 
(next post)
 
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Belisarius1234    OBNW   1/22/2013 10:08:36 AM
The Americans really have no excuse for their showing. Of all the combatants in WW II, THEY should have been the benchmark. 
 
From their sad actual record, all I can say, is that it's lucky that they had a set of professional air services that could take the junk, and wrong choices made, with which they started and managed to make it work.   
 
While a lot of propaganda exists as to how effective the American aircraft were, let's look at the truth in 1940?
 
The fighters...
 
The principle fighter was the dead-end Curtiss P-40 an Allison-engined evolution of the radial-engined P-36, itself a flying abomination that dated from 1934. While the Allison was reliable for an aircraft engine, due to a bungled aspirator circuit design and a rotten decision by the Army that a high altitude fighter was not necessary in this format, the P-40 was relegated to low altitude performance. This was fine for ground attack and CAS, but was useless for strategic air combat over Germany-where the central air-war would be decided.
 
The P-39 was a bells and whistles Bell aircraft designed as a target defense interceptor. It was small, light, agile, and was intended to pack a propeller hub nose-mounted bomber-wrecking and fighter-killing auto-cannon! Sounds perfect? The auto-cannon chosen was too slow-firing with too limited a muzzle velocity, the mid-engine design placement of the liquid-cooled Allison engine meant that the only place the plane could fly was in an ice-box like Russia, without overheating. The lunatic decision to remove the two stage supercharger circuit Bell aircraft designed into the plane robbed the Allison of power and altitude performance. Sad.          
 
The P-38 was the American jewel. It was supposed to solve all the problems that the Americans thought they would face in the Pacific for range, altitude, speed, armament. The plane carried an auto-cannon (The HS 404, American version, which gave nothing but trouble)  a quad pack of Browning 50s, that was good enough against the Japanese, but inadequate to kill European fighters, and it had a properly turbo-charged Allison pair of engines that would give good performance at high altitude. Such was the eventual result, but it took four years to get there, because the idiotic air-staff kept sending the plane back to the drawing board. Plus Lockheed, then, as now, had superb aircraft designers (Kelly Johnson, the only ones in his league alive at the time were Kurt Tank, Ernst Heinkel, Ed Heinemann, and Jack Northrop. NOTICE all the Americans?) and a POOR management team that could not execute the needed engineering miracles Johnson and crew turned out on the factory flow.
 
The war-designed aircraft, the P-51, the P-47, the F6F, the F4U, and so forth, as well the debugged P-38 did what they were supposed to do. The P-51 used a British engine and supercharger air breather circuit in an American designed airframe (North American) which was superior to the Spitfire from a manufacturing standpoint and a near equal performance wise killed the Luftwaffe, though it must be remembered that when the Thunderbolts (P-47s) appeared over Berlin in 1944, THAT was the plane that caused Fatso Herman to declare that the German Luftwaffe lost the war (It was actually Galland's comment, THERE is your flying BARN DOOR, Herr Reichmasschall!). The Bearcat made by Grumman showed what an American radial-engined fighter could have been with the superb Pratt R-2800.  
 
But the point was that these were rushed compromised designs, that were just good enough, and not as good as they should have been.
 
But if the underpowered, too large, poorly aspirated American fighters were saved by thrust efficiency from advanced propeller design and world leading airframe, and aircraft manufacturing design techniques, what about the bombers?
 
That part is a hideous story in ineptitude and poor planning, and will come later.
 
 B.
 
 
 
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