Ad: This forum contains affiliate links to products on Amazon and eBay. More information in Terms and rules
Lockheed didn't want to produce the single-rotation unit and they also knew planes headed for Europe would need altitude performance. Both the single-rotation and the non-turbo would result in unhappy customers, and Lockheed wasn't looking for that outcome.
In the end, the government order prevailed.....
You're being much too picky, Tomo...
The V-1710-93 had an auxiliary stage added. It was not an engine with internal 2-stages, and could easily be tuned to run without the auxiliary stage by the addition of standard parts. It had the external auxiliary stage. Yes, it functioned as a 2-stage engine, but the basic engine was still a single-stage supercharged V-12 that had the pressure carburetor fed by the aux stage.
The -93 did make it into the early P-63As, of which the USA got few. They only made 200 P-63A-8s, 730 P-63A-10s and 38 TP-63A-10s. 2,397 of 3,303 of all P-63 variants went to the Soviet Union, and the vast majority of the early -93's went to someone else and we never saw them except for the delivery flights through Alaska.
All the rest of the V-1710s equipped with auxiliary stage superchargers were of the -100 series and that is why all the allison experts ignore the sub-100 series engines ... very few were actually flown and the survivors with the aux stages are rare...
So what I said earlier pretty much goes. Our regular service pilots really only saw the -100 series Allisons with the Aux-stage superchargers. A few test pilots saw earlier Aux-stage units, but they never made service and nobody who went through USAAF A&P school who got assigned to active-duty units had much to do with the sub -100 aux-stage engines except for a very few early P-63As that we got. The P-63s we DID get usually went to reserve units. We assigned 1825 P-63 serial numbers, but actually got about 900 of them, the vast majority of which had -100 series Allisons installed. I doubt we ever saw more than maybe 50 of the early P-63As with -93 engines, and they were never issued to combat units.
I believe the Soviets were responsible for moving the cannon forward and almost doubling the ammunition capacity and they made several other changes to ensure the P-63 could recover from flat spins. It proved to be a good bird for them.
That would have to be an early war RAF roundel, if that was the case, as the roundel changed in 1942.
There wasn't a "Lightning I" order that preceded a "Lightning II" order, per Bodie anyway. All were ordered as Is. The British did indeed change the "Lightning I" order to a mix of "Lightning Is (model 322B) the "Lightning II" (turboed version) for a portion of their order (524 of the approximately 670 piece order). They learned quickly during the BOB and realized the non-turbocharged versions would not do what they needed. And by that time the BoB was over and there wasn't quite the desperate need that there had been. I THINK the Lightning IIs were supposed to be "equivalent to the P-38-e", which would have been "handed" and turboed engines. However, Britain cancelled the order for all but 3 airplanes, I think all "Lightning Is, prior to the first delivery. I wish Bodie's book was available as an e-book, it would make searching much easier!
Tomo,
The U.S. government classified Allisons with dash numbers, such as -101, -127, etc. Allison's internal classifications were E, F, G etc. All the contracts with the US Government specified government dash numbers, not Allison letter numbers. The -100 series were all the Allisons from the -101 (F27R) onward. Every Allison user knows that, and almost all Allison users these days don't care what number is on the data plate as long as the internals are 100-series units. The 100-series internals are significantly better in many ways as a group than the earlier dash numbers. The first E's that were 100-series were the E21s (-117s).
In my first paragraph above, I said the -93 was a 2-stage engine, but not with 2 internal stages. It was a single-stage main unit with an aux stage added. Perhaps the arrogance and misinformation are coming from your side.
I don't consider myself arrogant but I KNOW what is going on the Allison world today, as far as what stock is there and who can do what. There really aren't THAT many options.
The Soviets did have a role in moving the P-63 cannon forward, and the reason the P-63 didn't have flat-spin issues was largely due to the Soviet test pilot assigned to the P-63 project in the USA. They ignored him at first but soon found his inputs were vlaid. I've heard stories that the Soviets moved a few things forward when the P-63's got to the Soviet Union to further move the C.G. forward, but have never seen the claim substantiated with any evidence of same. Then again, I haven't really been looking for the evidence, either, because it's not a subject of much interest to me. I'm very interested in flying P-63s; not so much static things in Russian museums. Static displays are just not very interesting to me unless there are no examples of the type flyable and flying; then they start to get somewhat interesting.