Hello Schweik,
I believe you are underestimating the sheer amount of effort required to develop an aircraft engine.
Consider the case of the Packard Merlin. They STARTED with a proven design with proven performance which the Soviets did not have. They had all the drawings supplied to them by Rolls Royce and working examples of the Merlin XX and it still took them about a year to get things straight. Remember that this was before the days of computers, calculators and photocopying.
I am very surprised you are saying this considering our recent discussion about the P-40K. The Allison had no trouble making the power and had excellent durability and flexibility. It just didn't have the supercharger for really good altitude performance. If you look at what these engines are capable of when run to their limits, you will find that the Allison in very high power applications seems to be superior in durability to the Merlin.
I've read widely differing opinions as to which was better in terms of reliability in the MTO, Merlin or Allison, but I don't think Allisons were perfect. For one thing the highest amount of horsepower they ever delivered in an actual deployed combat aircraft was roughly 1,600 hp in the V-1710-111/113 of the P-38, at 1,600 hp (WEP) using a turbo. Second best is probably the 1,550 / 1580 hp delivered by the P-40K at low altitude, again at WEP. That is good but not great. Most deployed engines were producing more like 1,200-1,300 hp at military power and ~ 1,400 for WEP. Yes they could be overboosted but that did not always correlate with a long engine life or great reliability.
And they didn't get there overnight because there was a long series of improvements and internal strengthening that had to be done to crankshafts, crank case and other components before that became safe to use. Later war experiments with Allison engined aircraft, particularly when flying at altitude, indicated possible quality control problems.
RR Merlins by contrast in addition to multi-speed and two stage superchargers got comfortably into the 1,700 hp range and were able to operate for long periods of time at high RPMs and boost (for example enabling the high speed cruise on Mosquitos). Merlin 130 and 133 got up to 2,000 hp.
Ultimately the supercharger is part of the whole engine package. Allison never developed good high altitude versions of their engines, except with the turbo and that ended up being extremely temperamental and fraught implementation, delaying the realization of the potential of the P-38 by probably at least a year. Ultimately for that reason especially I would judge it as adequate and not exceptional.
Whether airborne communications helps depends a lot on whether the pilots are trained to fight as a team. It also helps when someone beyond visual range has information which significantly affects the tactical situation.
Imagine a radio message coming in that says: "Stop chasing the Torpedo Planes! There is an incoming raid at high altitude that is 20 miles out."
How do you coordinate with your wingman or the rest of your squadron in the middle of a dogfight?
This is one of the areas in which it really helps to read a little operational history. We were talking about the P-39 earlier, for the Soviets the radios in the P-39 (it had two although they sometimes removed one of the receivers) were it's number one asset. They built their fighting tactics (flying in echelon at two altitudes, and with wingmen) around the radios. Yes I can imagine that trying to grasp how a radio made a big difference could be difficult if you had no idea of operational details, but it most certainly did make an
enormous difference. There is a good reason why the Americans, British, Germans and eventually Japanese put good radio sets in all their military aircraft. You yourself brought this up as a major problem for the Japanese (early on) which is why it's baffling that you seem to argue the opposite here.
I'm not an expert on this, but from what I understand most American fighters used SCR-274 or SCR-522 radios, often one transmitter / receiver in the HF band, and a second receiver only on the VF band, and sometimes also navigation and IFF sets. The American radios were preferred over the British ones in North Africa because they had four preset (programmable) channels that you could change with a button like in the old AM radios in cars back in the day, vs. a knob that you had to tune in. For fighter units, one channel on the transmitter / receiver was tuned to a squadron band, that way you didn't hear chatter from miles away on the coast. Another channel might be base, another might be tuned to communicate with other friendly units. The second (receiver only) radio would be for communication from the squadron leader or from base / ground controllers (the Soviets made heavy use of ground controllers). Once you were tuned into the right channel it was easy to use the radio in combat, the P-39 had a transmit button on the throttle handle and a mute / talk switch on the O2 mask.
From what I have read the number one message you would need to hear in the middle of a dogfight would be "break!" for the whole squadron, or "Number 51, Break!!!" for a specific aircraft, which definitely saved many lives. Another example would be "ten miles north of Gamut heading toward base two 109s chasing" which could help a lot if you were in a bind outside of the chaotic melee. Use of the radio however was risky when facing the Germans as they had excellent countermeasures and could use radio chatter and signals to plan unpleasant surprises, so chatter was kept to a minimum especially before combat started. When many of the Australian veterans of the MTO moved to the Pacific they were amazed at the amount of free radio chatter. Apparently the Japanese didn't have as sophisticated of a system. But I wouldn't want you to naively and trustingly take my word for it. Read up on what the Soviets said themselves.
You need to remember that Packard was not taking the Merlin as a baseline and manufacturing new models of engines. They were adapting existing engine designs and changes had to be shared and approved by Rolls Royce. THAT was the contract. They did make some adaptations but that was mostly in terms of measuring standards (Decimal versus Fractions of an inch). Packard wasn't even allowed to use SAE thread standards and had to stick with Whitworth threads and ended up having to make their own screws and bolts in house because they could not buy them on this side of the pond.
Actually you are overstating the case here a bit, Packard made a lot of changes for example changing the coatings of the bearings to use indium. It's true they didn't make their own variants of RR engines but as you note, just to produce good quality merlins required a pretty high state of organization, the only thing preventing them from making their own variants was the contract I believe.
Hello Dan Fahey,
The P-40Q was better than earlier P-40s but it still didn't have what was wanted and that was Speed.
It was still about 25-30 MPH slower than the P-51 that was already in production.
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The F6F was much slower than the P-51 but it certainly proved useful, wouldn't you say?
