JonJGoldberg said:
lesofprimus: I see my quotes all over your postings, but none that confirm what you say I said about the German pilots. As for pissing contests, stoped that around 10.
As for the rest of you, seems we are having trouble deciding what may be the best fighter of WW2. I gave a shot at creating a comparison chart. My plane didn't win. Check it out. Maybe we can fix it. It should help us all start to be able to decide this 1once and for all...
Great work. An interesting comparison and thumbs up for doing it.
Just a couple of points
1. The P-38s top speed was 440 mph at 25,700 feet with Allison V-1710-111/113 at 64 inches of manifold pressure. The common figure of 420/421 is for the J with Allison V-1710-89/91s at 60 Hg. The 414 mph for the P-38L is for the Allison V-1710s running at 60" Hg. They were cleared by Allison for 64" of manifold in late 1943, the 111/113 engines recieving a new quill shaft and other reinforcements, making them better able to handle the higher power. It was never 'offical' in the written in stone sense, but it was the most common rating for P-38Ls on 110/145 octane.
2. The Fw-190D could do 366-369 mph at sea level with MW-50 boost, fitted from the second production airframe and used from December 1944. At full emergency power with MW-50 some Doras recorded 379 mph at sea level. 366-369 would be typical of a service example. The 356 mph figure is for full combat power, but not full emergency power.
3. All P-47D-27s or later were operationally limited to 64 inches mainfold producing some 2600 hp with the P&W 2800-59. Top speed was 441-444 mph at 30,000 feet.
4. The P-38J, L manual gives the P-38 a placard dive limit rating of 480mph True Airspeed (420 IAS). The manual states "Do not exceed placard limits more than 20mph with dive recovery flaps extended. Carlo Popps excellent P-38 article gives the dive redline at 500 mph.
5. What weights are the slow speed stall limits given for? For example the P-38 had a slow speed stall limit of 94 mph at 15,000 lbs and 105 mph at 19,000 lbs, both with flaps up. 'Dirty' stall speed (flaps and gear down) is noted as 69 mph and 78 mph respectively .
6. Ammunition for the Mg151/20s in the FW-190 was 200 rpg in the wing guns and 475 rpg for the Mg131 in the nose. At your reduced RoF due to synch, firing duration should be about 22.5 seconds for the cannon and 43 seconds for the nose guns.
I also have a few issues with your gun power assesments, but that is a seperate and entirely complex enough issue on its own and I won't hold you to it.
Bonus points could also be handed out for gyroscopic gunsites fitted to US, British and German fighters.
You could also look at factors such as sustained rate of climb, time to height, acceleration, power to weight, airframe drag.
Other factors to think about when judging a fighter include stick control forces, performance between 10-20,000 feet (where the majority of WW2 aviation actions took place), stall characteristics (istall indication, benign or violent, "mush" or wingdrop, control surface response ect), stall recovery characteristics (good or poor), armour protection/vulnerabilities, cockpit visibility, pilot workload (engine management, trim, instrument positioning) cockpit size and layout, sighting view (degrees of deflection over nose), takeoff and landing characteristics, dive acceleration, glide path, external ordanance options, duration allowable in WER/overboost ect and so on.
It would be interesting to see what happened if you added a Spitfire XIV, XXi or Tempest V to that list. Similarly, a Ki-84 or a La-7.