It was possible. Now was it practical?
and where you are flying does make a big difference. Not many AA guns in the China Sea between Formosa and the Philippines.
Germans lost 109s and 110s due to bullet holes in the radiators. What would the losses have been for planes without self sealing fuel tanks, the heck with fires, just have 20 or more gallons leak out on the several hundred mile trip home. How many German pilots were saved by back armor?
The British, at least in the BoB, knew when the Germans were coming and were often already at 25,000ft or higher when they arrived. Likewise the Germans often had lots of warning about High altitude allied raids.
Would either the British or Germans have purchased a plane with the strength factor of the Zero?
Max dive speed of the early ones was about 390mph . They had to put thicker, heavier wing skin plating on the later ones to increase the dive speed. Would any european country have built a plane with a such a restriction in order to get range?
Aerodynamic loads go up with the square of the speed. A faster plane has to be built heavier, everything else being equal, which it seldom is.
Part of the Zero's success was it took a while to figure out what it could not do. Once the allies figured that out the successes of the Zero started to taper off.
listing bombers with built in guns as possible fighters just means, yes they have range, but can they really fight single seat fighters or are they in much more trouble than the historic 110s? An escort fighter has to be able to at least hold it's own and not just be a slightly more difficult target than the bombers for the defenders.
First, lets remember the context. I was not suggesting, or even implying, that Japan should have literally sent all their A6Ms to Hamburg via a fleet of submarines.
The original context of the discussion was the failings of the Bf 110. Some people still apparently are stuck on whether the Bf 110 was actually successful or not. I say as a day fighter it was unsuccessful.
And I also say, the Luftwaffe had a need for a long range day fighter which could hold it's own with Allied fighters.
This has been compressed into just the BoB as with so many aviation discussions of WW2, but I think the a long range escort fighter of some type could have really helped their war effort probably through 1942, and maybe halfway into 1943. After that it was definitely too late.
Luckily for us they didn't.
Since the debate got redirected into a BoB discussion, and people claimed that fighters with a 1,000 mile range didn't exist, or that bombers with a 1,000 mile range didn't exist, or that bombers that could fly 1,000 miles couldn't do any harm... I provided examples demonstrating those claims to be false. I also showed multiple examples of long range fighters from the early and late war, as well as immediately postwar since most of the truly late war designs didn't make it into combat in time to see action.
For the early war period, the Zero is one of the prime examples. Of course the airframe had some limitations, but I think those tend to be exaggerated. So to that.
Re: Armor. My understanding is that early in the BoB, fighters on both sides lacked armor, and I also know that some of the fuel tanks on the British fighters weren't fully protected until years later. Like the one between the engine and the pilot. Am I wrong about that?
Regarding flaws or how quickly the Zero was defeated. This tends to be exaggerated a lot too. I believe A6M2s were still posing a challenge to Spitfires in 1943.
Yes by mid 1942 certain pilots and certain units had figured out methods to contend with the Zero so that an encounter wasn't tantamount to certain doom, but that didn't mean the threat went away or that the A6M (or the Ki-43 for that matter) had become a pushover by then. Nor did faster planes like P-38s, F6Fs and F4Us guarantee victory. The A6M was certainly an aged design by 43, especially since the A6M3 model wasn't much of an improvement over the -2, but it was still a dangerous opponent. Greg Boyington was shot down by a Zero in 1944 and he was not the only Ace shot down late in the war by early model Japanese fighters.
For the BoB scenario, the question would be how fast the other side could adapt itself to the extraordinary capabilites of the A6M, including it's astonishing range.
The biggest difference with Japanese fighters in general by 1943 or 44 was actually the pilots, and the lack of trained aircrew in general which was certainly telling by that point. The Germans were facing a similar problem though not quite as desperately.
None of this changes the fact that it was clearly
possible to make an effective long range fighter even in 1940. Certainly by 1942 it was comfortably within the realm of possibility IF priorities and politics didn't get in the way and IF the designers were up to the challenge. Aircraft like the A6M show us it was possible as early as 1940. Fighters like the Ki-84, P-47, P-51, F4U, P-38, and so on show us clearly that it was
plausible by the mid-war (whether they got their designs into action and up to speed in time was another matter).
Of course, it's very tricky to get sorted out in time to be useful, and it also meant engines had to be improved which was probably the most technologically challenging part of the whole thing. And that is part of why it didn't happen during the war, why the Bf 110 fell behind as a design in 1940 (despite the great bravery of their crews Pbehn) and never caught up. The other reasons were more due to politics (Messerschmitt's cozy relationship with Hitler for example), bureaucracy, bad design decisions, bad luck, and mistakes.