Best Fighter

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cheddar cheese said:
It was being designed at one stage with Merlins, but they cancelled the project.
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Aside from adding weight (I think it was 1000+lbs) it really wouldn't have been benificial the -30 allisions in the L model put out 1,750hp in WEP and the turbo's were making this power long after the supercharged merlins were losing power due to altitude - that's why the P-38L could clime higher.

The difference the merlin made in the P-51 was due to the addition of the supercharger much more than the ghange to the Merlin - a fine engine in it's own right.
 
Kelly Johnson had initially wanted to put Merlins into the P-38 but the idea was shot down from the higher ups. The Merlin was more reliable and more powerful than the early Allisons and that would have benfited the P-38 early on in the war, especially in Europe. The F-30 series Allison was a very good engine and it did produce more hp than contemporary Merlins. The advantage that the Merlin would have offered would have been the fact that the Merlin could have used geared supercharging rather than turbosupercharging. This would have saved on complexity and allowed an exhaust hood to be fitted turning engine exhaust into thrust. All told, however, the P-38L was probably as good or better than any Merlin-engined Lightning was going to be.
 
when you ask people to name a WWII plane, if they have no knowledge on the subject they will atleast know of, and therefore say, the spitfire, the fact that a person knows about the spitfire but knows nothing else on the subject makes it a true great, but it wasn't the best aircraft of the war, if you want a really simple explanation, the hurricane was a great aircraft, but on paper it was nothing special and there were countless planes that were better...........
 
I still go P-38L as the best fighter of WWII it just didn't give up anything to anyone and was still there when the smoke cleared.

When considering best engines the 2800 has got to be in the running they were awsome. I read that they took some and ran them at WEP power settings and overboost (into the 3.000+hp range) for more than 250hrs continous and detected no problems on teardown.

I also saw a documentary recently where a crankshaft from a bf-109 was sent to Rolls Royce for duplication - it was returned with the caution "Take care of it, we can't reproduce it".
 
I was going to mention the R-2800 as one of the truly great engines of the war. You could put 20mm rounds directly into that engine and it would keep ticking. But of course I completely agree with Wmaxt that the P-38L was the best fighter of the war.
 
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