P-47's were great! Originally, watch jafo correct me, they were supposed to be fighters but were better suited to ground support. Big, bulky but packed a helluva punch. Another fave, actually two....P-38 Lightning and P-61 Black Widow. I liked the P-61 more I think because there was one variant that boasted four cannons, two to a side plus a mix of machine guns in the nose. Not to mention the two turrets it had. Each with four 50 calibers.

If I offended, I apologize.  I lump it in the same category as playing WW2 computer games as the Nazis and machinegunning down the hapless Yanks.  It's all in good fun.

No offense taken, just pointing out that's a topic that *could* easily offend.

They were still exceptional fighters, bit more short range than a long range escort plane. The P-51 replaced them on long range runs, but for short to medium stuff, it excelled.
I'm not sure why though...enter Jafo..

Oh, i loved the P-38, it's looks alone are enough!!!

My favortite WWII planes, in no order..

Spitfire...(a bit of a cliche to say that these days, since everyone liked 'em, but w/e)
P-51
Lanc
P-40 (close to my fav)
Bristol Beaufighter

Edit - How could i forget the F4U!!! I have two of these, one resin the other a limited edition die cast one, that remains boxed!

Yeah--but even though it's flawed the Nexus Six still really shows promise.

P-38s are nice.

And gotta love the Sturmoviks

Republic had a knack of building one thing but ending up with something else...both the Thunderbolt and Thunderchief in particular were BIG [really big], heavy....solid...and functional.  They were known to be able to take a lot of damage  which is why they were suited to ground support/attack.

The 'boffins' were curious about what stress the Thuds were actually put under during sorties over Vietnam so the installed specific G-force logging equipment....they were intended to handle -4 to +8 ... the usual sortof thing .... but one of them recorded 10.6 ....bugging out after an attack....;)

Spitfire MK IV or V, I forget which one, had a four bladed prop and wing mounted cannons. There was also one that had the wing tips squared off instead of rounded. Played havoc with the FW-190's. Then came the Tempest, bigger and heavier and the Typhoon, also another heavy. One thing that always got my curiosity going the Gloster Meteor. Twin engine jet yet, though it was a contemporary it, to my knowledge never saw combat. Always wondered how it would stack up against an ME-262.

Trivia: What propeller driven plane broke the sound barrier in late WWII.

Trivia #2: What propeller driven plane went through a brick wall and sustained very little damage.

None.

For the same reason there is a very finite limitation to the maximum speed of a helicopter....the first thing that approaches mach is the prop blade....and subsequently loses lift/thrust.  Mach 1 is the effective 'brick wall' for prop aircraft....;)

Actually it was a P-47 that attained that speed in a dive and it was a P-47 that went through a brick wall.

Chuck Yeager might get a bit upset about that....;p

The P-47 attaining it is folk-lore and cannot be proven as the airframe is purely sub-sonic and thus would be uncontrollable trans-sonic.... in other words "IF" a pilot attempted that in a dive he is now dead.

Compression-stall on a prop prevents it getting TO mach, let alone past it....;)

 

Well.....Not combat in the sense you mean. they were used to screen london for the V1 and the V2 and did saw some air to ground stuff, but never air to air.




It's like chinese whispers , i saw a doco investigating pilots claims that on numerous occasions P-51's had possible broke the sound barrier when in step dives. As i recall they didn't disprove that those pilots had gone supersonic, but they said it would need to be a perfect storm of circumstances to achieve it, and without the airframes to study, can never be proven.

One of the 'fun things' about FSX [the flight sim] is you can artificially crank up the power [speed] of an aircraft and some are so well modelled if you push mach in an airframe not intended to get there the control surfaces DO invert...ie ... nose down harder to pull out of a dive.

Quite 'spooky'...;)

I havent used a flight sim in a while. the last one i really got into was F-15 Strike Eagke II and that was a miroprose release on the Amiga! I prefer combat flight sims, but nothing ive looked at these days suits me, i'd want FSX but combat.

Are there many mods for FSX Jafo?

Er....in a word.....'squillions'.

Just about every plane ever built....and quite a few that weren't.

I have a screenie of landing Thunderbird 2 at Tulla airport somewhere.....;p

Extra-detailed scenery is available for just about the whole planet [and the moon...for that matter]...though I've only gone for Melbourne airport...and Essendon airport...and NY [Manhattan] - just for fun.....can't land on the Intrepid tho....not a hard-point.

Then...by the time you get into skinning the planes....you can have even more fun..... there's me as the pilot...;)

Nice! This might be something to look into, both your screenshots look amazing!

On the P-47 again..

Pushed up to the sound barrier.  Not able to go through it.

The P-38 could get close enough in a full throttle, high altitude power dive to start to flutter, shudder and rip aeirolons off.

The one aircraft that did really seriously push the sound barrier was the Me-163 Komet.

Pilots were warned in training not to dive under engine power and even in glide had to brake in long dives.

German engineers couldn't get a handle on the fact that the stresses were from compression of the atmosphere at speed and never remedied it.

Thats rocket powered though. Stands to reason it may have got close or broke through.

Yes--rocket powered but before jets were really perfected and combat operational.

The German engineers were baffled because they knew the engine could accelerate the aircraft faster but it began to fall apart as it accelerated past a certain point (and it was already a death trap).

Another thing they never quite figured out was that their gyroscopic gun sites were too slow to track as fast as the Komet could be brought about.

The survival rates of experienced pilots was so low and their combat deployments in the Komet so brief that no one could understand why the guns were so inaccurate until near the end of the war.

FYI Jafo--there's "Google Mars" too.

 

This is true.


Yes, but wasn't the bulk of deaths, or at least a good portion, upon landing, what were they thinking using skids. I know alot were shot down on approach to landing too, easy pickings.

I was thinking about planes that might have passed mach 1 before Yeager, and i'm actually surprised that the F-86 didn't achieve it, or come close. I know both the F-86 and the X-1 were flown about the same time, late '47 and with the 86's speed, ~600mph IIRC, it's not impossible that in high speed testing at altitude, they may have approached transition.
I know the F-86 did break the sound barrier in a dive after the X-1 had done it.

In any case the sound barrier had been well broke by 1947, in 1942 actually.

The Komet is the aircraft definitely known to have been pushing the sound barrier--by war's end, engineers were understanding more about compression and it's possible post WWII someone pushed close.  If you break the sound barrier though you know it.  There is a huge shake and a rush forward in speed--it would have been like nothing experienced before at that time.

The Me-262 got really nailed on landing and to a lesser extent the Komet did too.  The Allies knew very little about the Komet until after the war.  The largest number of Komet fatalities was from the droppable landing trolley bouncing back up and hitting the underside of the fuselage and detonating the explosive fuel mixture it used.  The other common cause was rough landings on the skid that caused the craft to bound and on dropping back, sloshing together unspent fuel elements--blowing up the craft yet another way.

The plane handled very well and was easy to fly but it was a monster on the details and took fast thinking and keen observation to avoid catastrophe and handle at full speed well enough to engage a target.

Ahh your quite correct, it was the 262 i was thinking of, in regards to landing, the komet was the one giving the pilots back issues.

Still no takers on what went SOS in '42?

First I'm hearing of a plane going SOS that early in the war. The Germans had some pretty good equipment and in some respects were years ahead of the rest of the world. Good solid engineering but with the wrong people in charge. Had the upper echelons left things alone and not listened to their half crazed bosses the world might be a very different place. Werner Von Braun? (not sure if name is correct) might have stayed in Germany and Einstein might have stayed too instead of coming to the US in the early thirties.

Really need to brush up on my history. OMG!

The Sabre was the first 'operational' aircraft to do it....but still needed a shallow dive....;)