[Juha]

Hello Graham
it is sometimes difficult to say when during type evolution the revisions are so big that the plane warranted to be called new, IMHO classical case is F-84F Thunderstreak, still designation F-84 but name changed from Thunderjet. Now DB-3f had besides a new, longer and more streamlined nose also entirely newly designed wing, which besides having complete different inner structures was also a bit thinner.

Now we can speculated that if the development of Me 210 and He 177 had not ran into bad difficulties some historians may have divided LW a/c in use in summer 1941 into new and old types but we know that even if there was no new type, besides rather obscure Yer-2, to replace DB-3f/Il-4 and eventually none replaced it during the war, it is still classified as an old type. Now the prototype of Yer-2 was called DB-240, so it was clearly designed to do the same job but was it meant to replace or only supplement DB-3f in service, I don’t know.

So, I have difficult to comprehend why a type, which was more or less equal to one of LW's main bombers, namely He-111H, is put into same category as truly outdated TB-3. I think that this is an easily misleading way to present the capacity of Soviet bomber force.

Juha