Placing the Bell P39 Aircobra.

[Juha]

Hello Franek
I didn't claim that Il-2 was great; I only say that it was a good ground attack plane. The armoured a/c was one option with its pros and cons. But anyway it could take a lot of damage and survive and the armour seemed to give pilots confidence, which was important. And when enemy infantry learned that they usually could bring Ils down with their weapons, that at least should have lower their morale. It's alway help morale if one at least think that he can do something against a threat. On .5 Browning I should check the penetration power of its API round to make a valid quess of its lethality to Il-2 but poor Germans didn't have anything comparable.

On Cobra, after all it had only 1200hp engine, later models could use 1420hp WEP, but that was only for 5 minutes. Allisons seemed to have taken overboosting well but still there was a limit before serviceably began to suffer. If one could put better gun in nose, which IMHO may be problematic because of the a/c's sensitivy to COG changes, it would have increased weight. So IMHO there would not have been much reserve for armour weight to add, if one wanted to keep good handling and the capacity to carry 500lb bombload. After all Cobra had rather small wing. Of course there was pros also in smallness, less target area.

Only some thoughts, I don't have time to study this question deeper.

Cheers
Juha