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all i know is the average to make f6fs in a day is about 20
Chris, glad to see you are an advocate for Dean's "America's Hundred Thousand" also. Since I bought it a number of years ago, I have worn it out referring to it. IMO, the best book on that subject ever.
renrich said:This may not have relevance but it is my understanding that German fighter production was sort of a "cottage industry" where sub assemblies were built in many scattered small shops and then brought together for the finished product. One of the reasons that fighter production was not too badly hampered by strtegic bombing. Am I wrong?
Chris, glad to see you are an advocate for Dean's "America's Hundred Thousand" also. Since I bought it a number of years ago, I have worn it out referring to it. IMO, the best book on that subject ever. This may not have relevance but it is my understanding that German fighter production was sort of a "cottage industry" where sub assemblies were built in many scattered small shops and then brought together for the finished product. One of the reasons that fighter production was not too badly hampered by strtegic bombing. Am I wrong?
Now that we have a (rough) picture of how fast some of the fighters and bombers of WWII could be produced ... I posit the following arguments:
(1) The proponents of the 190 who say that the production of the 190 should have been made a priority over the 109 to the point of completely phasing out the 109 from service, are wrong. From 1942 onwards the 109 could be produced at the rate of roughly three 109s for every two 190s. Stopping production in 1942 January would have led to a shortage of fighters up to 1942 june or thereabouts...and that just wouldn't be realistic. Ditto 1943 and 1944.
"...Perhaps a better plan and this has been sliced and diced in other threads, was to build only two fighters for the US, the Corsair, which could have been ready for deployment by the AAF in late 1942 and had more range than the P47 and was suitable for the USN and the Merlin Mustang to supplant the Corsair in the escort role in late 1943-44.."
100% agree! I know Jug lovers will hate this...but it's the best possible solution given the timeline of development.
Apart from business opportunity and political considerations (that always drove this kind of decisions) there is one more variable to deal with at the moment one decide to invest in a complex machine like a top-end fighter: you don't know how the final product will behave.
As over-simplified example when the prototype of F4U was tested, there was no proof that the machine would had performed better than the parallel P47: why take the decision to sack one of the 2 if you can afford to develop both?
You spend more money but you are insured if one of the 2 will be a 'lemon' (or, more politely, will reveal too small development potential)
same can be said for P51, Fw190 etc.
Once you have a history of combat, logistics, maintenence etc. you can eventually decide what to prefer, but at that point the wheels are already turning and would be probably more expensive to abruptly stop a production system and convert it in a totally different one, at least in short time.
Keep in mind that this type of production was 'biggest possible mass for short time' : the machines were obsolete in few years, everybody knew that a model would not last for long.
Not just the german, I believe that any nation in the war could use just two basic airframe designs, one beeing designed around an inline engine with a clean aerodynamic finish and good altitude performance, the other build around a more powerful radial one:
The french had the MS406 -to be replaced with the D-520 inlines and Bloch 150 series radial fighters.
The soviets had the La-series radial driven fighters and the Yak-series inline ones.
The japanese had the Ki-61 and Ki-84.
The UK had Spit Tempest.
The US appears to have missed this opportunity to concentrate on single designs but to their defense one has to stress that some very good designs turned out at about the same time and it would have been problematic to judge them on paper, only.
The RAF did have the Centarus radial, and it was used in the Tempest II, which entered production in October 1944. The Centarus had been proposed for several fighters as early as 1942, but was considered too unreliable (even when the Sabre's TBO was about 25 hours) and thus didn't enter into service until the entry of the ill-fated Warwick, in July 1944.
The long story short is that the RAF could of had a 2,600-2,800 hp radial in serial production by (estimate here) of June/July 1943. Imagine a Typhoon re-engineered with an R-2800 and you can see the sort of thing that was possible.
Minor quibble, the Sabre, powering the Typhoon and the Tempest V, was not a radial, but a 24 cylinder liquid cooled horizontal H-type engine.