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Wait a minute, Hughes, of Spruce Goose fame, couldn't build a Mosquito?
Not angry at all. I'm a bit tired of being either misunderstood or being deliberately misinterpreted, but that goes with a forum I suspect.
Unsurprisingly I disagree with Shortround's comment on my comments. He took the route of deliberate misinterpretation.
Futzing with the A-20 is what generated the A-26; it was an evolutionary plane, not a revolutionary one. Stand them side by side (we have that happening right across from the museum now) and the family resemblance is obvious. It's sort of like standing a P-47B next to our Seversky AT-12 ... it is just scaled up a bit and has a belly for all the air and exhaust ducts to and from the turbocharger.
The A-18 Shrike could easily have been improved with a different, higher-speed airfoil, general cleanup, and a complete new set of engines. It would resemble the Me 110 and some of the Japanese planes, but COULD have been made a LOT faster with suitable attention. If you did it with attention to a possible bomb load, you would have a high-speed bomber with some bomb load that I would not care to speculate on without some design work that I am not interested in doing.
You don't have to do a complete redesign of the B-26 to make it a lot better. Some changes have to be made, but not a complete redesign.
I don't think there is anything that could be done to make the Airacuda into a good aircraft unless they ditched the pods. Putting in two extra crewmen was never going to help performance!
Wait a minute, Hughes, of Spruce Goose fame, couldn't build a Mosquito?
Hughes was VERY good at making one of almost anything, They weren't too good at making 1,000 identical units as a production batch. They made one Spruce Goose, one Hughes speed record plane, one big 2-blade helicopter with tip jets, etc.
They did make a production batch of two F-11's, one of which Hughes himself crashed.
About the only thing they made many of was electronic in nature ... I'm thinking radars and guidance systems.
Let's see if anyone else, aside from Shortround, can see the family resemblance. See below. They went from a single-width fuselage to side-by-side, but the airframes are remarkably similar in many ways, from the dihedral of the horizontal tail, to the lines of the nose and tail cone and a lot more. They added a lower turret and, since the fuselage was wide enough for two in the A-26, it was more shallow. To get more fin area, they went to a squared-off shape, as they did for the wings and horizontal tail, too, but the general characteristics are almost identical.
The A-26 had 16% more wing area, 17% more power, and was overall 28% heavier for slightly heavier wing loading. Top speed for the A-26 was only about 4% higher than for the A-20.
If they had done nothing more than add the R-2800 to the A-20, they would have almost exactly the same performance, speed-wise, as they got with the A-26.