Educate me on the Me 410. Was it a good plane?

Ground attack. Some versions had airbrakes and could carry bombs, so it was like a replacement Stuka in some cases it seems.

Which variant was this one?

>It was a general-purpose heavy fighter

There is your answer then. The moment you try to build a "general-purpose" aircraft you're sunk. Throughout history, the most successful aircraft have been those specialized towards accomplishing one task very well. Attempts to make an aircraft that can do more than one thing inevitably end up producing aircraft that tries to do everything but cannot do anything particularly well.

all of them had it as far as i know

I'm pretty sure they all had the turrets. One on each side of the fuselage.

HOLY SHIT! The madmen put a 5 cm Pak 38 on the fucking thing!

Looks like some kind of proto-warthog

Yes I understood that nearly all fighter-bombers possessed turrets, but someone made mention of using mirrors to engage enemy aircraft. I was wondering about the credibility of that statement and if it were true.

I just remember hearing this somewhere; apparently the gunners had to use mirrors to see what was directly behind the aircraft.

thats nothing, heres a hs 129 with a pak 40

...

I got you famalam

HIVEMIND

>this entire post
Holy shit I don't even know where to begin.

Multiroles have fairly consistently proven to be incredibly useful through history, and they've only gotten more viable as time goes on. The failure of the German heavy fighters by no means invalidates that concept.

I had heard of a variant of fighter-bombers which yielded a rear gun that literally shot out the back of the aircraft and possessed an optic for the pilot to look through and adjust his aircraft to allow it to open fire on enemies located on his six. I fail to recall what aircraft it was, however.

>failure of German heavy fighters
What is the Me 110?

What about it? It was an excellent night fighter and capable attacker, but it pretty quickly proved to be unviable against any real fighter opposition.

>What is the Me 110?
spitfire bait?
should have gone with the fw 187

It was a fighter-bomber initiated over England around 1943 and yielded a fairly long line of service to the Luftwaffe. It was successful in taking down USAAF bombers, but was too slow to deal direct air to air combat with fighters. It also played a massive role as a night flier over England. It didn't see the end, until 1945. Overall an impressive addition to the Luftwaffe, but not a fighter, mind you.

Actually there were no dedicated night fighter Me 410s, at least none that saw any service. The night fighters were almost exclusively Bf 110s and Ju 88s.

>Bf 110
>1943
u wot m8

Holy shit those engines.

I misread that question.

In that case
>Me 410
>night fighter
u wot m8

Let's put in this way: generally speaking you can take an aircraft that was designed for air-to-air and it can perform adequately (but not great) as a light bomber. However, this does not work in reverse. If you try to take an aircraft that was initially designed for ground-attack/bombing and try to use it for air-to-air, then results are terrible.

plz no bully

It was used in aerial missions over England, at night. It was also used to assault the unprotected allied bombers over France and Germany between 1944 and 1945. It was not good at dealing with the direct combat of American fighters and wasn't as agile as a normal fighter, which was why it was assigned to assaulting slower and easier to hit aircraft.

>generally speaking you can take an aircraft that was designed for air-to-air and it can perform adequately (but not great) as a light bomber.

Excuse me?

>If you try to take an aircraft that was initially designed for ground-attack/bombing and try to use it for air-to-air, then results are terrible.

Maybe with the archaic doctrine of the '50s, but nowadays? The move towards sitting high and lobbing PGMs means that it's a lot easier to make a ground attack aircraft into a fighter. Hell, even in the '70s, you had the Tornado, which produced very capable strike and interceptor variants. More recently, there's the F-35, which is one of the most capable planes ever made.

Those are night intruder missions, not actual night fighting. Granted, you're right - it was good at those. But it was never really used in the role people usually think of when you say "night fighter"

I never stated that it was a fighter in those missions. I apologize for my usage of the word 'fighting' to describe it. It was a bomber and was used as such during most of its invasive operations over England.

but the phantom ii was an atrocious fighter

This is a WW2 thread, so bringing up modern jet fighters seems pointless. But if we must go there, consider what happened when McNamara tried to take the F-111 (intially designed as a long-range strike aircraft) and adapt it into a fighter. Terrible results. The Navy hated the damn thing and dumped it at the first opportunity.

>Excuse me?

What did he mean by this?

I do have a question, however, do you think that the usage of V-2 and V-1 Rockets (seeing as to how they were innovating it by 1942), instead of the usage of day and night bombers and fighters would've altered the outcome of the war in England, or would it have never mattered to begin with?

V-1s were meme machines.
V-2s were the shit.

No.

It was a logical step forward in the "Zerstorer" (German for Destroyer) idea that began with the Bf-110, in that a Zerstorer would have the range to escort bombers and pack a wallop in it's armament. The basic design would also be useful for a host of other roles.

However, it's well known that the Bf-110 simply couldn't cope with agile single engine fighters like the Spitfire. Messerschmidt developed the Me 210 to be it's successor, with much improved performance, and the relatively good remote turret system for rear protection. However, the Me 210 suffered from stability problems that required some major changes, in particular with changing the wing shape and lengthening the fuselage to become the Me 410 we know and love today. As a general fighter, it was horribly outmatched by 400 MPH class fighters that had the benefit of better agility and energy retention. The Hornisse as the Me410 would be called was designed like it's Bf-110 forbear to be useful in other tasks.

Facilitating this need for flexibility came about in the form of the weapons bay mounted at the front of the fuselage, where weapons packs or bombs could be installed, including extra 20mm MG 151 cannons, 30mm MK108 Cannons, or the infamous PK5 50mm automatic cannon. There are numerous versions of the Hornisse, but in general 2x 20mm MG 151 + 2x MGs (either 7.92mm MG 17s in early versions, 13mm MG 131s later on) were standard on most models, mounted above the weapons bay. There were provisions for bomb racks on the inner wings since the weapons bay was limited to 2x 500 Kg bombs. These racks were limited to smaller bombs (50 and 100 Kg bombs I think), but the Hornisse could carry a considerable total weapons load in general.

>Continued

The radar equipped models like the B6/R3 are actually anti-shipping variants IIRC, and were hence armed to the teeth with 30mm cannons in addition to their standard 20mm + MG weaponry. I think there were even instances of anti-ship missiles being deployed on these versions too.

So essentially, for everything other than direct dogfighting and escort, the Me 410 family is a pretty good airframe. Had the war dragged on further, I think it would've made an interesting candidate for the early German turboprops in development. Hell, it's sort of a wet dream for me.

So it was essentially a gun platform?

>turboprops
What? Care to explain?

I hate to break it to you, but pretty much any WW2 fighter was "essentially a gun platform."

Well, give or take certain fighter-bombers. The Il-2 Sturmovik was possessed its own weapons-platform, based on the number of bombs, missiles, and turrets that could be mounted on it. The same could be said about the Bf 110 and certain variants of bombers. So, yes, fighters and fighter-bombers.

>implying the Bf 109 was a gun platform
>implying that that the......
yeah, pretty much every fighter but the 109 was a gun platform...

No it wasn't. Where the hell did you get that idea? It's one of the most successful fighters in history, and arguably the best of its generation. It was an inadequate fleet defense interceptor, but it was by no means a bad fighter.

>The F-111 meme
The F-111 was a clusterfuck because the Air Force and Navy were forced to combine two diverging requirements into a single platform when the technology didn't support it. Unlike most multiroles, which just combine the
>generic air superiority fighter
>generic tactical bomber
into a single role, McNamara wanted to combine the extremes of both - a long range interdictor and a heavy fleet defense interceptor. Along with all of that, the Navy decided they wanted side-by-side seating and a self-contained ejection capsule for the cockpit that drove the weight way up (all against the objections of the Air Force). Given how widely the requirements were diverging and how unrealistic many of the requirements from both services were, it's no surprise that the F-111B didn't exactly pan out, especially considering the Navy didn't like either of the proposals.

And outside of the F-111 (which still turned out to be a tremendously effective strike aircraft), just about every aircraft we designed from the Century Series onwards was a multirole. Around the same time as the F-111, you had the F-16 and F-18 take shape, which both proved to be tremendously capable multiroles.

Seriously, this meme that multiroles don't work is retarded.

So, the Ar 234...
How does Veeky Forums see it?

Fairly good light bomber, though it came too late to make an impact on the war.

were there any 2 engine fighter aircraft during ww2 that could take on single engine fighters without a massive dissadvantage

There was the P-38, but even it struggled outside of the Pacific.

how was the do 335 perform, did the inline engines give it better handling than normal twin engine?

Well the Do 335 was the fastest piston engined aircraft of the war, though its bulk probably would have made it hard to really dogfight with.

>You had the F-16 and F-18 take shape, which both proved to be tremendously capable multiroles.

But here is the thing, both of those aircraft began life as pure air-to-air fighters and then were modified to carry bombs later on. The orginal lightweight fighter program (which spawned both aircraft) did not contain any requirements for ground-attack. The LWF was intended to be a lightweight, low-cost fighter with high maneuverability.

the only schnellbomber that was actually schnell enough

I love the P-38, its such a weird looking aircraft.

>>TFW You will never experience the glory of flying the Me 410 yourself against hordes of allied aircraft.

Just a highly adaptable airframe for many tasks. The revolver style rocket launcher is pretty interesting, there are plenty of pictures and info about Me 410 weapons bay configs. I also really like the planned Me 410C version with redesigned front fuselage.

Slightly off topic, but the Me 410 B6/R3 is my favorite aircraft in War Thunder for Tanks Realistic Battle. The 30mm HVAP ammo reliably penetrates the relatively thin upper armor of almost all upper tier tanks in the game. It's a difficult shot, and requires a steep dive and airbrakes to prevent loss of pitch rate at high speed, especially when you use joystick like myself (mouse is for faggots). Only real problem is the B6/R3's relatively high battle rating that subjects it to superprops, but I'm quite skilled at handling even those in Tanks RB. Thank God for turret gunner auto-spot.

>War Thunder
We should play together sometime. The best 410 I have is the B with the 50 mm

P-38 is the closest thing I can think of. The XF5F, Do335, Tigercat, Mosquito derived Sea Hornet and Argentinean Nancu are likely good candidates too, but alas you can make single engine props just as fast, generally faster climbing, and more agile of course. Not to mention it's cheaper.

>just as fast, generally faster climbing, and more agile of course. Not to mention it's cheaper
but with less range, which is the purpose of these heavy fighters

I've been playing simulator alot lately now, because the RP reward is so much higher, esp since I'm working on getting access to my first Brit jet and ultimately the Hunter.

Sim has a huge learning curve, but once I realized the RP reward, I've forced myself to get decent at it. It's alot of time spent flying around looking for little black dots in the distance or sneaking up on your exposed ass.

You're right, until the P-47 and P-51 came along.

However, one thing that always bothered me about WW2 aircraft was how little their fuel tanks were. They had plenty of extra volume for more tankage, even if it meant managing the aircraft's inflight trim. If weight was a concern, it's not like an interceptor had to be fully fueled and could be fueled in tanks at the nominal CG.

Once jets and swept wings came around, engineers were forced to deal with trim changes anyways as they had to pack in the fuel where they could thanks to thirsty jet engines and the enormous changes in center of lift that come about thanks to high speeds approaching Mach.

Bump.