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It goes back to the war when all the allied aircrew were told that the Japanese were myopic and their aircraft flimsy etc.
It won't tolerate as much battle damage before something fails but, when it is undamaged, it is as strong as it needs to be.
That's right, a policy based on racial prejudices, but in modern times the "race" element has (thankfully) been ditched and the hangover of the rest has continued, simply though a lack of information and a desire not to see the situation any other way.
My stepdad was also impartial to race, except for anything Chinese.
He hated anything Chinese and his absolute contempt for them stemmed from his experience at Chosin during the Korean war.
So many times, it's not following a narrative, but rather a personal situation that colors a person's point of view.
Same as any aircraft, really. You go punching a hole in any stressed skin structure and it weakens it considerably regardless of the metal gauge. The Zero was built like that for a reason and it did what it was supposed to do, and then some. The Zero was designed specifically to a difficult specification and that they achieved it by adopting the measures they did is remarkable.
Jiro Horikoshi was asked to design a Naval fighter with the performance of a western 1,500 hp fighter using an engine with only about 900 hp (880, actually, in early form). To do that, he had to eliminate weight on a rather extreme basis, shaving out ounces and pounds wherever he could do it. He succeeded admirably, and it DID have good performance, but it rather necessarily had some nice-to-have items missing.
The Sakae engine was a good one and was dead reliable, but it never DID get more than about 1,180 hp in production form. A bigger airframe, or at minimum a bigger fuselage, was required for a bigger radial when they built both the A7M Reppu and the J2M Raiden.
The early Ki-43 problems with the airframe weren't unique. The earlier Bf 109F and Hawker Typhoon had structural problems in the tail units, leading to several losses and the need to reinforce that area.Nakajima's Fragile Falcon
After overcoming some teething troubles, the Japanese army’s nimble Ki-43 Hayabusa claimed more Allied aircraft than the navy’s vaunted Zero.www.historynet.com