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Kind if depends on how much money and production capacity you have.
Converted fighters are cheap and usually plentiful.
dedicated airframe and or powerplants may give extra capabilities but are no longer cheap.
How much do you want to spend on the desired capabilities?
May also depend on the defenses.
The Spit and Mozzie were more than capable to do the job.Converted fighters are cheap and usually plentiful.
One of my first model aircraft was an Fw-189, and I've always been fond of that aircraft.Kind if depends on how much money and production capacity you have.
Converted fighters are cheap and usually plentiful.
dedicated airframe and or powerplants may give extra capabilities but are no longer cheap.
How much do you want to spend on the desired capabilities?
May also depend on the defenses.
A Luftwaffe recon officer noted that the Fw 189 had better survivability than recon Fw 190s.One of my first model aircraft was an Fw-189, and I've always been fond of that aircraft.
Did Germany have the capacity? It did use non-critical engines, on a one to one basis it possibly did more recon pr hour flown (at least covering less ground in greater detail) than a converted fighter. It may have relative more merit during a developing battle, where waiting for the photos to be interpreted may see the targets move on? We may be able to define more than one kind of tactical reconnaisance. Thinking about it, I'm not sure what the label entails.
If memory serves, it was at least partly produced by Avia, so utilizing capacity that was not used for fighters. I have no idea what it cost, but it did use three man.
I don't know about survivability, when the shit hit the fan I'd probaly prefer a fighters performance. As for having a shot at a target, I may prefer slower speed, if there aren't too many targets shooting back.
define "tactical recon" as it varied so much depending on the year and the theater of operations or even by the locations (or targets) in just one theater.Well, we have the F-82 that was experimented with with using podded cameras. Would that be good for tactical recon? Or a Mosquito FB or DH Hornet, both of which would likely require little modification for the role?
The Fw-189 had a wing 2 sq/ft bigger than the F-82. it was 4 inch shorter. We can argue for years about which had more fuselage areaThe F-82 would make a bigger target than a P-51, but not much bigger than a P-38, and smaller than say the slower Fw-189.