There appear to have been a whole line of second tier manufacturers that could have had products: Fairey, Bristol.
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Only Defiants and Battles make some 3000 examples combined, almost all prior BoB were made. That points to the number of Merlins made, too - UK was in far better situation re. engines than Germany any time in war IMO, both power-wise numbers produced. And then we add what was received via LL...
The bigger problem is that many UK factories are not used to making Monocoque fuselages, but covered tube frame fuselages. If you have tooling and expertise to make a P-36 you can make a Spitfire. The number of Fairely Battles, Blenheims, Hampdens, Whitleys and other all metal aircraft should put to rest any notion that the British were short of aluminum before the war.
Would you please elaborate; perhaps you are referring to designed, but non produced engines?
Both Fairey and Bristol were capable of producing both engines and all metal airframes. With Hawkers Hurricane out of the way the road would be clear for these two.
Im suggest something equal to a spitfire with less compund curves (no elliptical wings). The RAF emphasis on handling would still be there. Fairey probably could use the Monarch H engine but I immagine the Merlin or Hercules engine would still be a conditate.
There is also the possibillity of a Hercules engined fighter; a radial engined aircraft could scarecelly be slower than the Hurricane while also relieving Rolls Royce of Merlin production issues.
For a number of years the Japanese, especially the IJN had a close realtionship with the UK. If the RAF had gotten their hands on a bunch of A6Ms the Jerries would have been in a heap of trouble.
Fairey was in no position to supply engines. It is one thing to build a few prototypes and test them. It is another to have 10s of thousands of sq ft (some American engine factories approached a 1/2 Million sq ft for a single factory by 1944) fully equipped with machine tools and casting/forging equipment and trained workers. It would have taken 2-3 years after a Fairey engine was selected for them to deliver them in large quantities.
The Hercules is also a no go for The BoB. Bristol just barely got it into production at the time they did. Prototypes ran great, getting the production engines to not use oil like a diesel took a while. The reason there were Merlin powered Beaufighters and Merlin powered Wellingtons was because of a lack (or perceived lack) of Hercules engines.
Speed is another issue. Slow as the Hurricane might have been the British weren't exactly masters of the low drag cowling in 1939/40 (actually, nobody was). The P-36 had 22% more drag than the Early P-40s. You are going to need a LOT of streamlining to counter that kind of drag difference.
Maybe, but the Zero was too lightly armed. You would need 8 .303's at least to meet the LW on equal terms.
John
RAAF Spitfire V had no problem defeating the Betty's and A6M2 that attacked Darwin
Fairy was a large and capable engineering group, most famous for its hydraulics. It certainly had the capital, expertise and managment to get reasonable mass production going though it would need help.
For instance the Westland Whirlwind had stunning peformance equal to that of the Spitfire, if equiped with Taurus engines it could have been flown earlier and deliveries (October 39) could have been earlier. Gloster F.5/34 could have been in production earlier than the Hurricane and likely developed with the Taurus or even Hercules.
The Spanish civil war is one of the most interesting conflicts in the 20st century but can not be seen seperate from the preceding 500 years of Iberic history. The Catalan and Bask seperations movements chose to fight on the republican side. I fail to see their reasons but they had nothing to do with the conflict at hand. Furthermore it is rather blindsighted to use the frase 'communist thugs', There must have been dozens of anarchistic, marxists, syndicalistic, Trotskist or whatever groups around that were not only batteling against Franco but also eachother. They wouldn't be your friend if you called them communist. The Spanish civil war is worth further debate, but not on this site.Spain was lucky to end up with Franco. There is a recent trend of misrepresenting the "Repubican Forces" as Freedom fighters rather than incipient communist thugs who had begun threatening Stalanist Style purges.
The standard narrative has long been that of a military coup against a democratic government and the noble Spanish people, supported by foreign idealists, heroically fighting evil "fascists." This is a grotesque distortion of the truth, and stands as one of the most flagrant examples of how propaganda has been uncritically accepted as official history.
First, it must be emphasized that the Leftist Spanish regime at the time of the nationalist revolt was by no means a coalition of mildly progressive liberals and socialists as it is usually described, but was, in fact, a reign of Communist and anarchist terror. Secondly, less than half of the Spanish military rebelled. The government forces were also at least as well equipped as the nationalist rebels, and they had greater economic resources at their disposal.
The escalation of violence in the years after the Leftist government under a liberal Freemason came to power becomes clear when one looks at the statistics: no bombings in 1930, then 175 in1931, 428 in1932 and 1,156 in1933. Towards the end of 1933, new elections were held that resulted in a great victory for a center-Right coalition. Predictably, this led to an intensification of the violence from the extreme Left. On 1 July 1934, former Prime Minister Azaña declared, "We prefer any kind of catastrophe to a Republic in the hands of monarchists and fascists, even if it means bloodshed."
This soon came to pass, and on a large scale. On 5 October 1934, an attempt at revolution against the legally elected government was made in Asturias, on the north coast. The revolutionary forces consisted of 20,000 socialist miners, 6,000 Communists and uncounted thousands of anarchists. After 17 days of Red terror, including such atrocities as the slaughter of 34 priests, members of religious orders and seminarians, the Army intervened. Two days of fighting resulted in 1,300 dead and over 3,000 wounded. One of the generals in command was Francisco Franco, who has since been criticized for having dealt too harshly with the Reds. However, at the time, anyone of normal intelligence understood what a Communist regime would mean, and realized that any attempt to establish such a regime had to be firmly nipped in the bud. The Communist massacres in Russia and during Bela Kùn's short-lived, but blood-soaked, reign in Hungary had not yet been smoothed over and hushed up in the manner which was to become the norm in the post-war Western world.
Nothing; the Hurricane had its own, unique, specification F.36/34, which became 15/36 for the develoment/Mk.I; the Spitfire was F.37/34, which became 16/36.historically what plane coming 2nd in the specifications win to hurricane?
He flew to London and offered his services to Charles de Gaulle's Free French movement, but de Gaulle considered him to be too pro-Communist and offered him no position.
In 1967 he made a final return to politics when he was elected as an independent Deputy for Paris, with the backing of the Communist Party.