Quote:
Originally Posted by tcolvin
[/list]One 10cent 7.92mm bullet downed Robert's Typhoon, and sent him to the Stalag. And you say his Typhoon was armoured?
... direct hits with 20-mm shells frequently had no effect on the plane".
The IL-2 is what I call armoured.
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A bullet in the radiator or a coolant line can stop a liquid-cooled engine. You cannot fully armour a radiator because it must have a free flow of air over it to function and if it doesn't, you engine seizes anyway. This is as true of an Il-2 as it is of a Typhoon.
I wonder how Luftwaffe fighters, primarily armed with 2 cm cannon, managed to shoot so many Il-2s down?
In your retrospective advocacy of armoured (and thus relatively slow and non-agile) aircraft, I think you'd do well to apply an "all-resources" analyis: to factor in the cost of producing and crewing the escorts necessary to keep the skies clear enough for your armoured machines to reach their targets and operate at acceptable cost, either as close escort or sweeping ahead.