German Newfag her.
Facts:
- Twin Engin Figthers a constructed for superior Speed, Power and Arming.
- WW2 Aerial warfare Figthermantra: "Speed-Height-Suprising" or "ZACK-BOOM"
No WW1-Dogfights
Reality
-Even the P-38 Lighting had serious problems agiants a fucking IAR-80(Like early war Me BF-109)
Question:
-What went wrong?
>>29847608
Twin engine fighters were for strike fighting and attacking bombers? Not intended to fight against far, far more agile single-engine fighters.
>>29847608
Turns out the benefit you get from twin engines isn't enough to make up for the performance losses you get from the added weight and drag. You're effectively relying on the added power of the second engine being enough to make up for the massive performance losses you're going to get in just about every aspect other than speed.
If you look at the places where heavy fighters generally worked, it was where the targets they encountered were massively outperformed. That generally means interception of bombers and whatnot (aerial interdiction, night fighter, etc), or operations in areas where enemy fighters are so far behind that they're not nearly fast enough to compete (Pacific theater).
The P-38 also had some issues with poor design that made things worse. The wings performed poorly at high speeds because they had an unusually low critical mach number, meaning that they hit transonic effects far sooner than a lot of the fighters they encountered. That killed the one advantage they were supposed to hold (speed), really hurting their prospects.
>>29847608
You don't think there were maneuvering or turning fights in WW2? Not everything got decided by zoom and boom and zoom off again.
If you can find a book called Wing Leader it give excellent descriptions of air war in Europe from the early days of WW2 until the end, it's also entertaining as hell; written by the highest scoring allied ace against German fighter aircraft. Even late war when both sides were fielding very fast aircraft there was still turning and rolling and stuff, you always zoomed in the initiation stages but there was still a melee after that. And unless you were in a jet you just didn't have the speed to leave everything behind, at any given altitude.
>>29847736
At First, no.
The Me BF-110 were constructed as "Über"Figther with Focus on Speed and Arming. Againts the britsh Figthers the sucks...
>>29847754
The Pacific theater were the fact i dont get... Japs were good at Dogfights but american figther hat more speed and firepower... but why than Twins sucks...
Thanks for show the P-38 Problem, thats explain a lot.
Can we sade: Twin Engine Figthers and their focus on Speed were overbreeding?
>>29847608
The A20 did pretty well.
Twin engine fighters were for radar, and thus night fightan and interceptan.
>>29847608
The reality is that sticking 2 engines results in heavier plane, that's almost all.
Of course twin-engine fighters had advantage of range or empty space so after the initial failure they were being used as long-range escort fighters, interceptors, night fighters etc.
>>29847977
>The Pacific theater were the fact i dont get... Japs were good at Dogfights but american figther hat more speed and firepower
The success of the P-38 there is thanks to a couple of reasons. A big part of it was the pants-on-head retarded design doctrine of Japanese fighters in the years leading up to the war, which prioritized maneuverability over literally everything else. For reference, the most modern fighter in the IJA inventory in late 1941 was the Ki-43, which could barely break 300mph. The A6M was slightly better, being optimized for range rather than turn performance, but still it was still fairly slow.
So pretty much their success there can be chalked up to the fact that they massively outclassed Japanese fighters, so reduced agility wasn't too much of an issue. Plus, you have to remember that the vast majority of what a fighter does isn't shooting at other fighters (particularly in the Pacific), but going after enemy bombers and patrol aircraft. For that, the P-38 did amazingly well thanks to its range.
It's why we see a lot of aircraft being disasters in Europe but going well in the Pacific - Japan was pretty fucking terrible at everything.
Really the P-38's performance wasn't all that great, though, even if it did outperform anything the Japanese were fielding. The highest-performance P-38 variant, the P-38L, had two engines for a total of 3,200hp, but it still had a slightly worse power-to-weight ratio and was slower than than the P-51, which had less than half the engine power.
>>29847862
>You don't think there were maneuvering or turning fights in WW2?
OP here. Oh no, not so hard. But i think mosty one side try to "sneak" to the other side... come out of the sun and shoutdown so mane enemies that the dogfight after a easy win is.
>>29847608
Because power to weight is all that matters, and most of the weight in ww2 fighters were engines and fuel.
