While everyone's looking up info, does anyone have the approximate flight distances of a round trip during the bombing campaign? I don't even know which field the 8th were stationed at but I'm doing up some missions on IL2.
I wanna see these aircraft go at it myself.
Also, not wanting to get into something out of my league here, but I thought the P38's twin-engine reliability was related to actually turning up at the combat zone.
There was always a percentage of aircraft, flying an appreciable distance to target not actually making it there due to simple navigation problems and engine troubles. Especially in the case of the latter I'd imagine this would be a little like rolling dice...don't get the snake-eyes whatever you do (like you get a choice). Probably be a little scary coming down over occupied Europe or in the midsts of something like a hundred seperate battlefields. Even ditching in the channel wouldn't be fun.
A P38 would certainly make you feel a little safer.
But combat reliability in the face of multiple cannon equipped enemy fighters I should think comes down more to not getting hit than anything else. And a one-engined P38 in combat is probably as good as a dead P38 anyway.
And yeah, a turbo-supercharged Allison isn't the best setup for cold northern Europe. European fighters used a centrifugal supercharger (which is like a mechanically driven turbocharger), more reliable when temperatures plummet. Conventional superchargers like those used on US engines are much less forgiving and prefer drag racing tracks to mountaineering. You need huge intercoolers for them when it's hot and you've gotta get out your engineering cap when it's cold.
I wanna see these aircraft go at it myself.
Also, not wanting to get into something out of my league here, but I thought the P38's twin-engine reliability was related to actually turning up at the combat zone.
There was always a percentage of aircraft, flying an appreciable distance to target not actually making it there due to simple navigation problems and engine troubles. Especially in the case of the latter I'd imagine this would be a little like rolling dice...don't get the snake-eyes whatever you do (like you get a choice). Probably be a little scary coming down over occupied Europe or in the midsts of something like a hundred seperate battlefields. Even ditching in the channel wouldn't be fun.
A P38 would certainly make you feel a little safer.
But combat reliability in the face of multiple cannon equipped enemy fighters I should think comes down more to not getting hit than anything else. And a one-engined P38 in combat is probably as good as a dead P38 anyway.
And yeah, a turbo-supercharged Allison isn't the best setup for cold northern Europe. European fighters used a centrifugal supercharger (which is like a mechanically driven turbocharger), more reliable when temperatures plummet. Conventional superchargers like those used on US engines are much less forgiving and prefer drag racing tracks to mountaineering. You need huge intercoolers for them when it's hot and you've gotta get out your engineering cap when it's cold.