Out of the Big Three WW2 bombers (B-17, B-24, Lancaster), was the Flying Fortress the most redundant?

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Clayton Magnet said:
There is a compelling argument for ditching the defensive armament all together, with the corresponding bump in performance. Box formations and massed bomber firepower proved to be almost ineffective at preventing fighter attacks anyway.
The .303 on British bombers probably wasn't the best option in hindsight, but then again, either was the .50 Browning.
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The Browning .50 caliber machine gun was a great choice! It had range & penetrating power far in excess of the .303 and it could be loaded as ball, AP, tracer, or explosive tipped.True, the 20mm packed a harder punch but those cannons had a slower rate of fire and the aircraft could not carry as much ammo. Look at the P-47 with 4ea .50 cal in each wing! Patton said he could always tell when they arrived in a place that had been worked over by Thunderbolts- there were holes in the concrete.
 
Clayton Magnet said:
There is a compelling argument for ditching the defensive armament all together, with the corresponding bump in performance.
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Only if you build a completely new bomber. Don't even keep the wheels/tires.

The compelling argument falls apart as quickly a cracker thrown against a cement wall when we are talking about taking the turrets out of an existing aircraft and covering up the holes.

avro_lancastrian.jpg

640px-Avro_691_Lancastrian_I-DALR_Alitalia.jpg


You aren't going to get a much better nose and tail than that.
Increase in speed was around 40mph or bit more ?

315 mph (507 km/h, 274 kn) at 58,000 lb (26,308 kg) and 12,000 ft (3,658 m)

But that is at lot less than max gross weight, like at 53,000lb in one source. In fact some of the performance numbers are at less weight than the mean weight of the bomber.

The Lancastrian was about 20-25mph faster than the York.
px-Avro_685_York_G-AGSP_BOAC_LAP_02.06.53_edited-1.jpg

It was too late in 1943-44. The streamline ex bomber wasn't fast enough to stay out of trouble.
 
manta22 said:
The Browning .50 caliber machine gun was a great choice! It had range & penetrating power far in excess of the .303 and it could be loaded as ball, AP, tracer, or explosive tipped.True, the 20mm packed a harder punch but those cannons had a slower rate of fire and the aircraft could not carry as much ammo. Look at the P-47 with 4ea .50 cal in each wing! Patton said he could always tell when they arrived in a place that had been worked over by Thunderbolts- there were holes in the concrete.
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It all depends on when you're making that choice. In 1943? Yes the 50 cal is a great choice. In 1940, not so much.
 
manta22 said:
The .303 was a really bad choice!
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So when your freezing your arse off at 20,000ft inside an alloy tube travelling at 200 miles an hour trying to hit a cannon armed fighter flashing past you doing 400 miles an hour with nothing more than ring and bead sights to aim with how is the .50 cal better than the .303?
 
Top speeds 287, 298, 315 mph, armed Lancaster, York, unarmed Lancaster as a basic sequence. Lancaster VI with tail turret only fitted 345 mph.

Lancastrian, Maximum all out level speeds. Mean weight 54,000 pounds approximately, Engines 3,000 RPM, +18 pounds/square inch boost, 285 mph at sea level (M.S.Gear), 300 mph at 3,500 feet (M.S.Gear), 315 mph at 12,000 feet (F.S.Gear). Maximum weak mixture cruising speeds Mean weight 54,000 pounds approximately, Engines 2,650 RPM, +7 pounds/square inch boost, 245 mph at sea level (M.S.Gear), 280 mph at 11,000 feet (M.S.Gear), 290 mph at 17,500 feet (F.S.Gear)

Agreed simply removing turrets from existing designs would not be enough, some effort has to go in boosting performance. Apart from the increase in speeds, lower defensive armament weight carried allows an increase the average bomb load thus requiring fewer bombers needed to deliver a given tonnage, therefore "invest the savings" in more fighters is the hindsight shown solution. Basic equation, 3.5 P-51 to the B-17, in money and unit manpower terms.

Illustrative absurd example, 8th AF 2,500 bombers, 1,000 fighters, to 1,500 Lancaster VI (but giving 15% more average bomb lift) and 4,500 P-51, clipping an hour off the flying time to Germany and back has weather, daylight and interception chances advantages. Three P-51 missions, 1) look for trouble, 2) standard 8th AF escort tactics, 3) spend the entire mission near the wing of "your" Lancaster in case hostile interceptors make contact. Lancaster VI cruising at around 300 mph makes mission 3 more viable than the historical around 240 mph bomber fast cruise speeds
 
Your going to have a hard time convincing crews to fly over Germany without guns regardless of how many escort fighters you have
 
I remember when first (too many years ago) I noticed that the speed of the early B-17's were a good bit higher than the later models, the G understandably being the slowest. Even then, it clearly was not considered to be high enough. But i coulkdn't help thinking that increasing speed could be an alternative to increasing armament.
So again I have for a long time wonderd why neither the B-17 nor the B-24 got more poerfull engines, though there certainly were some of considerably higher power available before the US entered the war. So i hope those who understand the technical side better than me can give some input. Would stronger engines be more difficult to boost for high altitude, making a difference so small it was not worth it? Would the increased fuel consumption and weight be unacceptable? In other words, did the engine packages used simply hit a sweet spot, neccessitating a new design to take advantage of the higher power available?
 
Just Schmidt said:
I remember when first (too many years ago) I noticed that the speed of the early B-17's were a good bit higher than the later models, the G understandably being the slowest. Even then, it clearly was not considered to be high enough. But i coulkdn't help thinking that increasing speed could be an alternative to increasing armament.
So again I have for a long time wonderd why neither the B-17 nor the B-24 got more poerfull engines, though there certainly were some of considerably higher power available before the US entered the war. So i hope those who understand the technical side better than me can give some input. Would stronger engines be more difficult to boost for high altitude, making a difference so small it was not worth it? Would the increased fuel consumption and weight be unacceptable? In other words, did the engine packages used simply hit a sweet spot, neccessitating a new design to take advantage of the higher power available?
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A few things, or more than a few.

the Allison was sort of the next step up from the R-1820 and R-1830 but only with the turbo. But.............
Production of Allisons by year.
1940..........................1149
1941..........................6402
1942......................14,904
1943......................21,068

When did they KNOW how many Allisons would be available and when (and the 1940 engines were the long nose C-15 engines that were 150hp lower than the radials).

The B-17s were built by Three factories, and they needed way more engines than Wright could provide so the Government a few weeks/months after the Packard deal, signed a deal with Studebaker to build the R-1820 radials. This was in late 1940 and due to the government changing their mind (Studebaker was originally supposed to make R-2600s) the first engines don't show up until 1942. Studebaker builds 6091 engines in 1942 and over 23,000 in 1943. Brand new factory, not built in Studebaker car factory/s.

Buick and Chevrolet were both signed up to make R-1830s for B-24s at about the same time.

Now as the pre war engines (counting 1939 as the start of the war) there was only one. The R-2600 was it. And this is not really a small quibble. for the R-2800 P & W only built 17 in all of 1940. Yes it shows up before Pearl Harbor but it is later in timing (Ford gets the Contract for the 2nd R-2800 Factory in Sept 1940, they were planning ahead, but it took time).

SO we are sort of down to the R-2600 and it went through a few problems.

1, the R-2600A (1600hp) did not take to turbocharging very well. A lot of trouble with the Prototype A-20 and after the first one all of that production batch had the turbos deleted, never to be seen again.

2. The R-2600B (1700hp) used a different crankcase (steel instead of aluminum and many other parts changes) so you could not build an R-2600B in a factory designed to build R-2600A's without a lot changes. It also was never turbo charged on a production version.

The R-2600BB (1900hp) doesn't show up until 1943. which is a bit late. It was used post war for converted water bombers.

The R-2600 in the early versions would offer a lot more take-off power than the normal B-17 and B-24 engines (but was a lot heavier) but without the turbo they didn't offer any more power at around 25,000ft. So no advantage at cruising speeds/altitudes.

A big problem with air cooled engines was keeping them cool. It is a matter of the amount of fin area on the cylinders and cylinder heads and the density of the air. The thinner air at 25,000 (or around there) would not allow for the cooling. I am bobbling this a bit. With a liquid engine you can design a bigger radiator to get the cooling you want on the same engine you were using. On the air cooled engine you need to change the engine, It was done but it took new methods of making fins and new ways to machine them to get the depth of fin and spacing they needed. P & W started with an advantage in that they were using smaller cylinders than Wright. 14 instead of 9 and 18 instead of 14 on the big engines and this almost automatically gave them more fin area for cooling. They still needed a lot of refining.

There were a lot of paper bombers designed using the R-2600 and R-2800 but some of them didn't offer much improvement or it was decided to make the jump to the R-3350 bombers. The B-24 program was huge and trying to change it was not easy and would have needed months to even split off parts of it.
 
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There's another dimension to the basic question, and that's the simple fact that you'd have had to go back quite a way to eliminate the B-17 in favor of more B-24s, all the way back to when the factories were set up and the jigs and fixtures manufactured to build the airplanes. Since the B-17 was created to a 1934 Army requirement while the B-24 wasn't even thought of until Consolidated was asked to build B-17s under license in 1938, planners would have had to be clairvoyant to foresee in 1934 that 1938 would bring a better airplane. Lacking that crystal ball, things had to proceed as they did. Once Consolidated was asked the B-17 licensing question, they said that they could create a better bomber, which would be only natural given the 4 years of aviation progress that had elapsed since the B-17 was conceived. Interestingly, this is exactly how the P-51 came to be, as a "we can do better" from North American when asked by the Brits to build P-40s for them.
Once production of B-17s was underway, switching over to B-24s would have required stopping those lines completely, dismantling the B-17 specific jigs and fixtures, building new jigs and fixtures for B-24 geometries, and then ramping back up through several stages of production before again reaching full capability. The need for bombers once the US entered the war was too desperate to allow any such thing. So really, the mix of B-17s and B-24s was bound to happen, there was no practical way to concentrate solely on the latter. It would have been far easier to build just the B-17, and had Consolidated accepted the Army's initial proposal, that's exactly what would have happened.
 
PAT303 said:
So when your freezing your arse off at 20,000ft inside an alloy tube travelling at 200 miles an hour trying to hit a cannon armed fighter flashing past you doing 400 miles an hour with nothing more than ring and bead sights to aim with how is the .50 cal better than the .303?
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Sorry, the answer is so obvious this does not deserve a reply.
 
PAT303 said:
So when your freezing your arse off at 20,000ft inside an alloy tube travelling at 200 miles an hour trying to hit a cannon armed fighter flashing past you doing 400 miles an hour with nothing more than ring and bead sights to aim with how is the .50 cal better than the .303?
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Range, if nothing else. Keeping a fighter too far out for accurate shooting is useful. And given the difficulty of actually hitting a fighter from a gun position, having a bigger slug with more kinetic energy is also pretty useful.

Minor improvements to be sure, but I'd be willing to bet that when you're fighting for your life at 25,000 feet, you'll take every improvement, no matter how minor.
 
Thumpalumpacus said:
'Twas a reference to a famous thread here. If you haven't read it, you ought to. Even though it was locked before I became a member here, I read every.damned.page.
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Oh, I caught the reference... I was similarly compelled to read the entire thread ....... At least you didn't mention the obvious solution.......
The P-39

I will now retreat to my bunker........
 
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