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That's a lot of argument for one airplane that didn't make production. But, decently done, Tomo. It likely explains the lack of production which seems to be as you wanted it and as it happened.Fair enough.
Simple - it probably was. Robust - according to whom?
It have had no guns installed.
RAF (as well as other air forces/services of the time) were looking for aircraft that can bring required firepower to the piece of the sky, within time required, in order to kill enemy aircraft. Unarmed aircraft don't qualify, no matter how they are easy to repair or easy to make.
No guns, no ammo. No flight test report, making the speed and RoC figures suspicious as the 400 mph XP-39, XF4U-1 and XP-38 turn of speed.
RAF/AM did the right thing when decided not to buy it.
We may mean different things.I know that I've mentioned the P-40 a couple of times, and even though it wasn't a great performer in the ETO (basically too slow for northern European operations, and not a good altitude performer even with the Merlin), it was cheap, simple (for a modern aircraft) and robust
And of the Soviet fighters, they were, especially the Yakovlev and Lavochkin fighters were noted for being high performance while being insanely simple to built and maintain, even allowing for the fact that wood wasn't the best material to build planes out of in the Russian climate (which resulted in the all metal Yak-3 M-107 and La-9/11 post war).
I know that I've mentioned the P-40 a couple of times, and even though it wasn't a great performer in the ETO (basically too slow for northern European operations, and not a good altitude performer even with the Merlin), it was cheap, simple (for a modern aircraft) and robust.
I've also mentioned the P-51, as it married advanced featured (mostly aero) into a relatively simple to produce and maintain airframe. Even the Lightweights (culminating on in the P-51H) took all of this a step further, and were optimized for both reduced weight and increased ease of maintenance for ground crews.
HiYou know if that book has info on either of the Miles M23 projects? The original M23 was a small, mostly wood(?) interceptor fighter powered by a Merlin or Griffon, and the M23A was a high altitude interceptor powered by a Merlin 60 series engine. As far as I know, though, these were just design exercises.
HiI know that I've mentioned the P-40 a couple of times, and even though it wasn't a great performer in the ETO (basically too slow for northern European operations, and not a good altitude performer even with the Merlin), it was cheap, simple (for a modern aircraft) and robust.
Cheap and easy to build and service, is my take on it. It kinda threw me at first, too, but I got it figured out. Sorta like today's Glock pistols versus a more complicated to build 1911 (I'm a solid, hardcore 1911 guy, personally).I'm still trying to figure out what a "Sten SMG" aircraft is. Arming an aircraft with one Sten doesn't seem, er, prudent.
Cheap and easy to build and service, is my take on it. It kinda threw me at first, too, but I got it figured out. Sorta like today's Glock pistols versus a more complicated to build 1911 (I'm a solid, hardcore 1911 guy, personally).
That's a lot of argument for one airplane that didn't make production. But, decently done, Tomo. It likely explains the lack of production which seems to be as you wanted it and as it happened.
I still think some air support would have been better than no air support in places that historically didn't have any.
Prices for P-40s are all over the place. Unless you KNOW what the price per aircraft was you can't take the contract price and divide by the number of aircraft to get the price per aircraft.
Contract prices sometimes include spare parts. They include documentation (manuals and parts lists) and you have to be careful if the price includes the entire aircraft or just the price of the aircraft minus any "government furnished equipment" (GFE).
Once WW II got going the US Army was writing and printing a lot of the training manuals and parts manuals. Who paid for that in early foreign sales may change in the early years but with lend lease???
France had purchased for their first 200 planes the money value of 50 airplanes as spare parts. The book does not say if that was airframes or complete aircraft. The French were buying FN guns to arm them with and not using the standard French machine guns. How much other "stuff" was changed? Radios, instruments (or just got French lettering?) oxygen system etc.
Now the French planes and the American P-36s overlapped in production and I don't know how they did it in 1938-39. By the Spring of 1941 Curtiss had 7 production lines operating in parallel and it was fairly easy to keep the British aircraft separate from the US aircraft and even the Chinese aircraft.
In Sept/Oct there were meetings between the US and British and Curtiss to get rid of some of the differences (like size of the radio shelves and/or brackets for example) to streamline production. Sometimes things got screwed up. The Russians got a bunch of early P-40s with the wrong generators. which they promptly burned out grounding a bunch of planes until a priority ship was sent to Russia to replace them.
Pricing really needs accountants and contract lawyers to short outa quicky claim that plane X cost $43,256 actually doesn't tell us a whole lot without some context.
Edit:> Pricing between countries also gets tricky, France had playing games with the currency exchange rate (so had Germany) so one really has to be careful when comparing the "price" of US planes sold to France and the price of French built aircraft.
And we also run into differences in tooling. The Sten gun could be turned out a shop the size of a garage with lathe and a welder (or perhaps the Welder was across the lane) as long as somebody was providing the rifled barrels or barrel blanks (30+ inch rifled tubes that could be cut into barrels). There are several different models of Sten, some used a lot less stamped sheet metal than others, some used a lot of tubing stock.Obviously, any aircraft is going to be way more involved to make than a SMG that was able to be made from stamped sheet metal and a handful of easily machined parts that can be made for about $10 in 1942 with simple tools.
They both shoot well.Cheap and easy to build and service, is my take on it. It kinda threw me at first, too, but I got it figured out. Sorta like today's Glock pistols versus a more complicated to build 1911 (I'm a solid, hardcore 1911 guy, personally).
I can't get past the Glock grip angle, they just don't point where they are supposed to, for me. Give me a CZ (Sp01, P-10) all day.But, I like them both. Add in a Sig, Beretta, Browning, and couple of others you have a good start on a collection.