Was this the best fighter of the world wars?

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/thread

>>373629
if it was so good why'd they lose :^)

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>>373618
It depends entirely on your criteria. Early war? Late war? What front? What altitudes? Do you have good airfields? All of these are huge factors in how successful fighters were in the war.

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>>373680
Trolling aside the Fw 190 was an excellent fighter. Plus, that BMW 801 engine it used was an amazing piece of engineering.

>>373629

It's an interceptor, not a fighter.

3/10 try harder next time.

>>373920
I'd take a P-47 over a Fw-190 any day.

jets were out near the end of the war, but they were outnumbered

>>373992
they also had engine lives measured in double digit hours, horrendous fuel consumption, and were also quite unreliable.

>>373992

They also were obscenely expensive, required constant engine replacements, were hard to hit targets with because they were too damn fast for their own good, and had short operational ranges.

It's telling that both the Americans and British had jets by 1944, and both powers said "Nah, we don't want em".

>>373968
>interceptor
>not a fighter
Oh boy it's that faggot from planethreads on /k/.

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Had this badass been ready 3 or 4 years earlier the RAF wouldn't have lasted a week

>>374045
Nope.
>Short range means it's pretty much useless for anything but interception
>low-velocity 30mm cannons shit for fighter combat

Granted, it'd make the RAF shit its pants, but they'd merely respond by accelerating development of the Meteor and Vampire to beat it.

>>374045
radar still existed

>>374071
Interception would've been a damn fine designation in ww2. There was plenty of bombing to go around.

In fact I bet these aircraft could have been made to hit a b29/b52 and then split

>>374082
>B-29
If you've got a damn good early warning network
>B-52
Definitely no. The B-52 is faster than the Me-262 and has a service ceiling over 10,000 feet higher.

>>374077

Radar only meant they could get the bombers, against the me 262 radars meant shit

>>374071
Based on Calais they would have reached london easily and protect the bombers to bomb london to the ground, without the east end the uk is fucked

>>374095

>Bomb london to the ground.

Impossible without 4 engined bombers which the Luftwaffe doesn't have, even against no defensse more than flak.

Also, playing escort kills the speed advantage, at which point, what the fuck are you even flying a jet for?

>>374095
Basing it out of Calais would have exposed it to the constant low-level raids the RAF was doing on the French coast. Making use of the same tactics the Allies developed later in the war to counter the Me 262 (hit it when it's going in for landing), they'd have been able to handle them easily.

Even if the Me 262 would have been able to secure air superiority over southeast England, the Luftwaffe lacked the bomber strength to bomb Britain into submission.

>>374118

Hell, Calais is close enough to the channel that the airfields would be vulnerable to artillery or naval bombardment.

>>374134
Naval bombardment wouldn't bee too much of a threat - the RN steered clear of the Channel at that time.

But a lot of people forget that the RAF was going nuts with cross-channel raids pretty much from the moment France fell. With no early warning network to fall back on, the raids more often than not came as a surprise to German airfields, putting tremendous pressure on crews already strained by their missions over England.

>>374143

> the RN steered clear of the Channel at that time.

With the big capital ships, sure, not the little boats, they were zipping around the channel (mostly minelaying and mineclearing) all the time.

Stick a few mortars on them and start pounding away at airfields.

>>373629
Ugh imagine being a tail gunner in some bomber trying to shoot one of those down only to get a 30mm minengeschoß to the chest

>>373909
The only post of wisdom in this thread, and it will be ignored for a continuous shitposting competition over the next few days.

>>374226
Assuming that didn't blow the plane up, your whole body would be red mist and give the rest of the crew PTSD. Maybe even the German pilot if he was close enough.

What's the difference between the FW190 and the BF109?

>>374246

The 190 was faster, had a higher flight ceiling, a longer range, and usually better guns (both designs went through many modifications over the war)

The 109 accelerated much better, and was a hell of a lot more maneuverable.


The former was designed to intercept, dive, and ambush, the latter was a dogfighter.

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>>374077

That's why Horten brothers made this.

Not a fighter, probably not even a good plane, but invisible to radars, great idea for the time.

>>374257
Mememememememememememeeeeeeeeemememememememememeeeeeeem3m3m3m3m3m3m3mememm3m3m3m3m3

The American soldier

>>374194
wait, how well would mounting heavy mortars on cockleboats work?

>>373981
>not godlike La-7
Pleb

la-5 or p-51 in terms of usefulness. If you want pure performance probably some jet experiment plane that never saw battle.

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>>373618
Come at me bro.

Nothing better until the P-51 came along.

>>375304
>quite slow
>two wing cannons with 60 rounds per gun
>no armor at all
>no gas tank protection
Only polish fighters can be inferior, if we're talking about 1939-1942.

>>375338
>no armor at all
This really isn't an uncommon for WWII fighters, mate.
>two wing cannons with 60 rounds per gun
In-line is obviously preferable, but they're cannons.
You don't need many rounds with cannons.

>>375347
If they are wing cannons, you need more rounds to compensate the lack of accuracy (if they are not close to the fuselage, like on Ta-152).
If you have a motor-cannon like ShWAK on Yaks, you don't need many rounds. Yet the rounds should have enough explosives to damage the enemy hard.

>>375347
Most fighters had something to at least protect the pilot. The zero was a paper plane.

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These 2

>>375431
The cutest murriplanes after P-39 and P-63

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>>373618
Fokker DVII

>>373618
Whatever fighter that may be, it certainly is not the Lightning.
>poor dogfighting characteristics
>got torn a new one in the European theatre due to lower quality fuel, lower temperatures and generally higher altitudes
>only advantage was range and its ability to fly around with one damaged engine, which made it well suited for the pacific theatre

There are just way to many negatives to this plane to make such a statement, apart from the fact that statements like that are stupid anyway.

>>373618
>Was this the best fighter of the world wars?
No.

The best one was from my country, not yours.

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Don't mind me, just bein' one of the most mass-produced and simultaneously most effective air-to-ground attack plane of all WW2

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>>375304
>Nothing better
*Loud cough*

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>>373618

The P38 was the A-10 of its day. Look at all that firepower in the nose. You've got a 20mm cannon for killing big bombers and four .50 guns for killing fighters.

>>374246
The Bf 109 was an older interceptor that happened to be incredibly agile. It had excellent maneuverability (particularly in the vertical regime), but the design's advantages came at the cost of it's small size. Range and armament were limited, and it could only carry a very light external payload.

The Fw 190 was a newer fighter designed around the BMW 801 radial engine. It was far more advanced than the Bf 109, and it boasted a far better armament and payload capacity, all while being faster. However, it flew completely differently from the Bf 109. Where the Bf 109 was a turn fighter, the Fw 190 was an energy fighter. It was supposed to make use of its superior speed, acceleration, and roll rate to make quick boom-and-zoom attacks.

The Fw 190 would be more versatile than the Bf 109, but it never completely took over because the Bf 109 was easier to produce. So while the Fw 190 replaced the Stuka with the Schlachtgeschwaders and carried heavy weapons against the bombers, the Bf 109 would remain important until the end of the war.

>>374257
It wouldn't be any kind of stealth. Just making something look sleep doesn't make it stealth.

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>>374257

>Any flying wing is a stealth plane

>>375973
>Most mass-produced
Yes
>Most effective
No.

Numerous Western fighters were more durable, capable, and effective than the Il-2. Shturmoviks had horrendous loss rates (something like a third of all built were lost) and a shit ton of design flaws. The armor weighed it down enough to cut performance and payload without really making it any more survivable, and its performance in ground attack missions was lacking. RS rockets were inaccurate and ineffective, and a payload of just four FAB-100s isn't going to do much against anything. Apart from niche duties like airfield strafing (which could be done just as well by actual fighters), it was shit.

And if you actually look at its combat record, you'll see that it really only started doing its job remotely well once they started throwing massed waves of Shturmoviks at things at Kursk. Even then, though, that was more psychological than anything else - turns out hundreds of planes flying overhead dropping bomblets is going to hurt morale.

>>376274
Most Ils were lost not in the battle, but because of other reasons like being lost on the field, crash landings etc.
>inaccurate rockets
RS-82 were weak, but RS-132 (and special variants like ROFS and BRS-132) were okay against heavy and large targets.
Also I doubt that any WW2 rockets were as accurate as modern rockets.
>4xFAB-100
In 1943 soviets have developed anti-tank PTAB bombs (192 bombs could be on a single Il). That was enough to damage numerous tanks.
FAB-100 was enough to blow up a Pz IV
And don't forget that storming raids are the hardest assignments during wartime.
Maybe you should play less of War Thunder.

>>373629
>losing a third of your air frames on takeoff and landing
>good
Lol

>>376478
>muh warthunder boogeyman

The issue wasn't that the rockets weren't powerful enough but that they were horribly inaccurate and ineffective compared to the rockets used by the Western Allies (which had a 45 lb warhead to the RS-132's 2 lb). A 2lb fragmentation warhead is going to be damn near useless unless you get a direct hit. Bombing was similarly ineffective because of the lack of an effective bombsight and the fact that 100kg bombs aren't going to do much against hardened targets unless you get a direct hit. Look at Finnish accounts of the Il-2 - they weren't worried about them at all unless they were going after soft targets out in the open.

And you're talking about PTABs like the Il-2 was the only plane that could carry them. PTABs were great, but just about any plane that could carry bombs could drop PTABs. Hell, they even developed a Yak-9 variant that could carry 128 PTABs.

And then you've got design flaws like the hastily-added rear gunner, which cut performance and messed with handling - issues that weren't addressed until late in the war.

Couple that with pants-on-head retarded doctrine for the first half of the war (low-level raids of 3-4 planes making strafing runs one at a time) and it's even worse. The Il-2 really only started being effective once commanders decided to throw an entire Air Army's worth of Il-2s at individual targets. Hard assignments are no excuse - they were flying needlessly dangerous missions with a sub-par aircraft.