Damage resistance is definitely a criteria which is a function of the armor, and the placement of equipment and structural components. In some cases, they weren't necessarily designed to absorb damage, but did it really good.GrauGeist said:
360.4 mph and 369.7 mph.Laurelix said:
I know it could turn well at altitude, though I never knew the turning time. The F4F was around 17-19 secs right?
Do you have figures for that?
Many mistakes. The rectilinear Mustang wing gave more total lift than the larger elliptical Spitfire wing! The thinner Spit wing had a lower CL and more wash out that greatly reduced the total lift. But the Spit was more than a ton (2?) lighter and thus had a lower wing loading. If you look at the stall speeds at weights you get the idea. In addition, it was the wing twist under load near the tips combined with the wash out that gave the Spit the gentile stall and "Great" Handling early models were famous for. Later models acquired defects with the greater weight and larger props until the Mk-XIV was nearly un-usable for the first year of it's service. (Note the year long time between service entry and first kill!) Those "Snaking" problems persisted until the adoption of larger tails and were only completely fixed with the much larger "Spiteful" tail later on. But they built over a thousand Mk-XIVs because they were so desperate they had no choice. It was their only true 400 MPH plane. The Mk-IX does not count because of said defects which were unfixed! The Snaking in the Mk-XIV was so bad and major defect in a dog fight, but only a minor problem chasing a doodle bug. Watch A2A gunnery film to see the snaking and what it did to gunnery for your self. The Mustang had the exact same problem with the larger chord prop on the P-51H and had to add 8", or was it 18" to the top of the rudder and stretch the fuse more than a little to get a longer lever arm to fix it. All planes go through that type of thing, where mods are required to fix unk defects only found later in combat service. The P-38 was just about the only plane of that era that they found the defects before service, but because it was the only 400 MPH plane in existence at the time, they bought it any way! And do not be fooled by the published 414 MPH placard speed published in all the books. Do you think adding almost 700 HP would not change the actual, but un-tested speed? Just swapping props gave 450 MPH in one un-built but tested type.
Not true at all. All of the things you mention have to do with car design, not gage. There were plans way back in the 1840-50s to make the gage 3.2 M for all the right reasons but one, cost of conversion. So it got shelved. Put any current car on a set of 3.2 Meter trucks and it can go MORE places than the same car on Standard Gage trucks because the roof will be closer to the ground. Curves are based on the length between truck pivot points, not the gage. Everything else is built around the outside dimensions of the cars, not the Gage. It was time to change the original Roman era Gage when they first started building rail roads in 1825, but they were not very good engineers and went with historical data, thus screwing all of us now.
Had nothing to do with "Ancient Mystics" but everything to do with the minimum width of a two man, two horse chariot's axel and wheels!
Damage resistance is a function of only two major items! How thick the aircraft skin is and whether or not it has an air cooled engine! All other aspects of damage resistance are insignificant in comparison to either of those two factors! American Aircraft were made with thicker and stronger alloys making them more tolerant of damage and heavier. The P-47 was made of much thicker and stronger alloy and was thus the most damage resistant single engined plane of WW-II. All other aircraft of all other Nations were made of thinner and weaker aluminum sheets. Armor was a secondary concern as it only protected a small aria of the total plane. The Il-2 Sturmovic with over a tonne of armor was easy to shoot down, if you knew how. Read EBH's book. The armor only gave partial protection to certain parts and only to RCMGs and some smaller shell fragments. (Rifle Caliber Machine Guns) That made the Il-2 harder to shoot down from the ground, but a single bullet in any radiator brought the plane down with absolute certainty. On the Russian front, that slow leak might get you home, or might not, but the mission was over at that point of impact and the pilot's only mission was to survive and RTB!
Except that the 109 was identical from the firewall back through most of the models. I think it had the absolute highest parts through put between models of any plane in the war. The new mods had different numbers, but some had significant carry over of major sections. This can not be said of the Grumman's, Mustangs, or etc...
I dispute your claim that the Spit-IX had an "Excellent" combat record. In "Circuses" type fighter sweeps over France it got it's butt handed to it's pilots at a horrific rate with many more losses than wins, which was never made public until many years after the war and then not widely!
Not quite right. The Spiteful had an entirely new and larger tail.
There are many gauges other than standard gauge and many new railways have been made which are single use with custom stock high speed lines, non have been made with a gauge anywhere near 3 meters so obviously todays engineers are not as well versed in these things as you are.
Is this why the P-51 had a much better rate of climb than the Spitfire?
By that time( late 42/ early 43) to the best of my recollection the Brits had a boatload of 400 mph fighters either in service or about to arive in a few months so I don't know why they would be desperate in that regard. The ones that come to mind are the Typhoon, the Spitfire mks 8 and 9, the p51b, and in the not to distant pipeline the Tempest.
Production line for the Tempest was being set up early 1943.
