Eastern vs Western Front (was: La-7 vs ???)

[Ruy Horta]

Originally Posted by Franek Grabowski

Yes, it had and by no means it was improvised but factory build. Bomber variant is easily distinguishable by a removed fabric on two inner sections of port lower wing. There is a bombsight.

No. Only Soviet wartime aircraft in Polish museums are Po-2LNB and Pe-2FT, the latter in rather poor condition. Tu-2 is a post war one and still had a painted bombsight.

The U2 is a poor example in any case you turn it, lets leave it at that.

Now the Tu-2 is more interesting.
Can you proof that the a/c is complete?

I've got many a/c detail books and sometimes they are in remarkably complete condition, but often gunsights and bombsights are the first item missing.

Now if you can proof that the bombsight was missing on the operational Tu-2 I'd say good for you, but taking this museum sample as your main example is poor judgement.

I certainly believe that many early Soviet types were pressed into service without certain items (gunsights, primitive gunsights, fewer than the complete gun set etc etc etc), but by the time the Tu-2 saw service as a bomber most of these, if not all of these, supply problems had been solved.

It would be interesting to learn about the specific history of your "sample" aircraft and decide how good an example it actually is based on that information.