right shoot a few answers that you fail to understand. 1, By your own numbers if the spit shot down 1 german for every 2 the hurricane shot down, as there were less than 1 spitfire for every two hurricanes this makes the spits numbers better than those of the hurricane! or is your basic maths so poor as to be unable to understand this bais calculation? you bend these fact to you own ends when a minute of thought would see that your numbers are basically flawed. you have never provided any evidence that increased range would result in more interceptions whilst the staff at Uxbridge when asked this same question were under the impression that increased rrange would have made no difference! and if range is so important then why were the raf short fueling the fighters during the BOB surely they would have been trying to squeez as much feul in as possible! as to the .5 issue larry is correct that by 1940 FDR wopuld have said yes to the production of .5s in the UK however in 1936 the answer was no! and as pointed out many times when the spit and hurricane entered service they were the heaviest armed fighters of the day! by the time it became obvious that the 303 was no longer sufficent the raf had decided that cannons were the future and by 40 had cannon armed spits flying - unfortunatly not reliably. your claim that 2x.5 nose guns and 2 x .30 wing guns was superior to 2x20mm and 4 x .303 is joke! but your hindsight is so flawed, if the RAF knew what the BOB was going to be like would they have given up any performace of the spit for the sake of additional fuel that wasnt going to be used! yes it would have been advantagous later in the war but had the RAF been destroyed in 1940 then an ability in 42 would have been pointless would it not! if they RAF had the kind of foresight you mention then the RAF would have been equiped with jets by 1940. as for RM the original spit specification was for a range 30% lower than Mitchell actually included. yes the spec was written after the spit was on the drawing bored but not as you claim after it had flown, the design was changed many times in line with the proposal, like the removal of the bomb racks on the original proposal! it is you that make false asumptions, according to both cranwell and uxbridge range was not a factor on the RAF side (it was a major one on the Luftwaffe side that is agreed however the luftwaffe was an airforce design on specific job of ground support not strategic bombing) you claim that range would have made a difference yet no evidence supports this.

shooter the fact an aircraft could reach 30k doesnt mean a great deal if its performace at altitude was poor, there are many fighters that could reach 20k+ but performed so badly that once there were only targets not threats the P40 was one of these. to say just because an aircraft can do something it means it can do to a level required to be effective is even poorer debating, you find anyone that will back your claim that a P40 could match a spit or 109 at 15000ft+

larry the hurricane mk1 had some 200hp less than the merlin P40 and the Mk2 had the same engine as the p40 yet as you point out the mk2 was slighter superior! the assumption that can be made from this is that had the p40 got the melin in 1940 it would have been slightly inferior to the hurricane! why didnt curtis use merlins? britain needed US dollars Iam sure a leicense could have been arranged! surely they knew of the performance issues with the Alison? so why did they fit what was an inferior engine?

Larry, I think you are greatly overestimating the problems of increasing the internal fuel capacity of the spit. The rear tanks used in the IX and XVI had no more effect on handling than the rear tank on the Mustang. The wing tanks in the MkXVIII (not to be confused with the PR XIX) held 26.5 Imp gallon each (tot 53 imp gal), it had the full E-wing armament. It was a development of the XIV and was in everyway a spitfire. As for droptanks, the XIV carried a 90 gal combat drop tank and still expected to out perform bf-109s and BMW powered fw-190s. The narrow track landing gear was only a minor problem. The spit never suffered the take-off problems of the bf-109. I also wouldn't confuse lightness of controls with being a poor shooting platform. It wasn't as good as the Hurricane but as MF pointed out, it can't have been that bad because pilots were able to fly it with enough precision to tip V1s.

To OBNW: The Hurri II had a slightly superior sc to the Merlin P40, but was still inferior in speed, dive, roll, etc., and needed 160 more hp to do it. To AussieEngineer: The MkXVIII added to the wing fuel load, but that was only possible because RMs telescoping wing spar was replace with an extruded spar which was new tech, not available earlier. And the MkXVIII was not in time to see combat. So this was an opition not perviously available. I contend that the advantage of increased range on interceptions should be obvious from our prior discussion: sinply the chance for additional interception attempts, some of which would succeed, resulting in an improved intercept/sortie ratio. I don't recall claiming that 2x.5s and 4x.30s was better than 20mms + mgs. I do claim that they're superior to 8x.303s. Note that the use of 20mms in Spitfires during BoB was in very small numbers, and much less than a shining success in operations. Useful as a developemental program, but the reliability problems crippled them. Curtiss didn't use Merlins (or demand a better blower for the Allison) for the same reason the Spitfire had such short range -- lack of foresight. The USAAC didn't expect to need high altitude performance in standard fighters (same philosophy as the Soviets) just as the RAF didn't see the need for longer range.

To AussieEngineer: Acrobatic ability (the V1 tipping thing) isn't the same as shooting which requires the an a/c that can be held steady for proper sighting. I would argue that the only reason for wing tipping was an inability to hit a fairly small, but non-evading target at long enough range. How many times was it done because the Spit had expended its ammo without result??? Standard drop tank for pre-MkXIV was 50 gal. Larger tanks had been tried, but not found to be practical. The larger tank was only workable because of the power and weight increase of the a/c, which had adverse effects on the acrobatics of the model. It lost much more height in standard maneuvers than earlier versions. Quote from Flt Lt Don Healey, No17 Sqn.: "Extra height had to be allowed for rolls and loops, as it tended to 'wash out' when being flown in this way. 'Ginger' Lacey graphically demonstrated just how serious a problem this was when he attempted to do a loop from what he thought was an adequate height over Madura one afternoon. At the bottom of the loop he cleared the ground by barely four feet, and upon recovering back at the field, looked ten years older ..."

The V-1650-1 Packard-Merlin in the P-40F was equivilent to the Merlin XX in the Hurricane II, both produced the pretty much the same amount of power. 1,280 hp for the Merlin XX and 1,300 hp for the V-1650-1. The P-40F, which had an engine with an extra 300 hp had inferior performance than the Mk I spitfire. Compare it to the MkIII, the only spit flown with a Merlin XX and the P-40F is comes out decidedly second best. While the P-40s generally poor performance even with the Merlin engine is not rectifiable the range problems of the spitfire could have been solved relatively easily, in ways I've outlined a couple of times now. The V1 tipping was done because it meant the pilot didn't have to worry about flying debre from the bomb exploding. "Acrobatic ability (the V1 tipping thing) isn't the same as shooting which requires the an a/c that can be held steady for proper sighting" Aerobatic ability had nothing to do with it, the spits weren't doing barrel rolls and hammerheads while they were tipping the V1s. It was an exercise in extremely precise flying. If the pilots of the spitfires had not been able to make small precise adjustments to their flightpath they would not have been able to tip V1s. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/96/Spitfire_Tipping_V-1_Flying_Bomb.jpg"> Don't tell me flying this close didn't require precise control.

You have offered claims of improved fuel load and range for the Spitfire, but I haven't seen anything that would work. The problem was combat fuel load -- the load of fuel the a/c could carry into actual combat. For the Spitfire that was 85-95 in the internal tank, plus 35 more in the wing tanks starting with the MkVIII. The fuselage tank had to be empty, or nearly so for cg reasons, and those actually installed were not self sealing so could only be used for ferry flights. The increases used in the PR Spits involved removal of guns, and often armor. The limits for external fuel load have already been covered. Range with maximum auxiliary fuel lists for the MkXIVE as 850 miles. Range on internal fuel 460 miles. That makes combat radius 340 miles, after nearly four years of attempts to increase it.

My ref. lists the Merlin XX as 1460 hp. compared to 1300 for the V-1650-1 engine of the P40F -- 160 hp difference as stated in my previous post. MkII Spitfire with Merlin XII, 1175 hp. -- 125 less than the V-1650-1. Performance of Merlin P40 superior to Hurricane except for climb rate. Compared to Spitfure II, inferior in climb, slightly inverior in turn rate and speed, superior in dive acceleration, roll rate, fire power and gun platform stability. If the range problem of the Spitfire fighter could be fixed so easily, why wasn't it ever done??? As for the landing gear not being a problem, check out Johnnie Johnson's description of the landing that ended his first flight in a Spitfire. As to the attacks on V1s, if the Spitfire could have hit it reliably from a useful distance it wouldn't have been use to 'tip' the things. Due to the control sensativity, effective shooting range was just shorter than for most other fighters. Usually no big thing with the combat style the RAF usually used, but a serious problem trying to deal with a target as small, and explosive as a V1.

Why do you think a rear fuselage tank would have been impossible. The Mustang, the definitive long range fighter of the war had a rear fuselage tank. 13 gal in each wing, an extra 10 gal in the main tank and 30 gal in the rear would be a 75% increase in fuel capacity. The 30 gal in the rear tank would be mostly used up in climb and cruise, even in a short range intercept mission. There are no valid technical or operational problems that would prevent the above modifications.

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"The Merlin XX provided 954 kW (1,280 HP). A Hurricane I was refitted with it to become the prototype for the "Hurricane Mark II" series. The prototype performed its first flight on 11 June 1940. The initial Mark II, the "Mark IIA Series 1", was essentially just a Mark I with the new engine. The first of this type went into squadron service in September 1940, just as the Battle of Britain was reaching its peak. Hawker then introduced the "Mark IIA Series 2", which featured a new wing scheme." http://www.vectorsite.net/avhurr.html#m3 I've seen the 1,280 figure around a lot. The Hurricane IIC also had a more powerful armament and the spit IIBs armament was roughly equivlent, while the IIAs was indeed inferior. The Merlin XII on the spit II had only a single speed supercharger while the V-1650-1 had a 2 speed supercharger. The Merlin XX powered MkIII had a top speed of 385 mph.

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Do you know what the safe altitude for dropping a 2000 lb bomb was? 2000 feet. The V-1 had a 2000lb warhead and was full of jet fuel. Also the aircraft in flying toward the explosion at over 400 mph. Do you really think that any fighter could accurately shoot that far at a target that small? The Tempest pilots also used the tipping tactic. Your really making a mountain out of a mole hill. The spit wasn't the best gun platform but it was by no means a terrible gun platform.