The B17

The B17 could carry 4000 Lbs of bombs, a B24 Liberator could carry about 8000, more than double a B17
So why did they continue to use B17s when they had another type of aircraft that could do the job of 2 17s in 1?

Other urls found in this thread:

aviation-history.com/boeing/b17.html
aviation-history.com/consolidated/b24.html
dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a397895.pdf
youtube.com/watch?v=so5w-h7GFEc
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

money, airfield size easier to produce.

memes, nigga.

I'm pretty sure the two were equally easy to mass produce

The B17 could fly much higher, and had enormously more in the way of defensive armament and ability to absorb damage. It doesn't do you much good to load twice as many bombs if you keep getting shot down.

Then there's the fact that the factories that produced liberators and flying fortresses were developed separately and simultaneously. Even if the USAAF decided that they wanted to switch over completely to one type of heavy bomber, that would involve shutting down half their factories, retraining their work crews, retooling the factories itself to produce a different plane, so that maybe 6-8 months later you could start building more of the other. In the meantime, you're out all the planes that the factories would have built in that time, and given American productive efforts, that's probably in the thousands.

Your being "pretty sure" is not data.

Also, I'd bet that payload to target was not the only operational difference in these bombers. Survivability being an obvious factor that might make one preferable to another. Though of curse my bet is not evidence either.

>enormously more in terms of defensive armament
>both had a nose gunner, side gunners, a dorsal and central turret, and tail gunner so their guns were literally exactly the same

Aside from that, thanks

Tooling.

Boeing made B-17's in their factory, and couldn't covert to making B-24's in a hurry (nor did they want to).

Their guns were not exactly the same.

aviation-history.com/boeing/b17.html

aviation-history.com/consolidated/b24.html

11-13>6-10

World War II War Production-Why Were the B-17 and B-24 Produced in Parallel?
dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a397895.pdf

the bigger the plane is the more complicated the plane is. the more complicated it is, the harder it is to mass produce.

*a challenger appears*

its a sin that there arent any of these birds left in flyable condition.

>fifi and doc

>ywn fly a B-29 on a firebombing raid over Japan
Why even live

Because they already had the B-17 production lines up and running and the USAAC would rather have more B-17s now than wait for those lines to retool for B-24s. The B-24 was better by all accounts, being faster, longer ranged, easier to produce, and more versatile, but the B-17 had the key advantage of being what the Air Force was already flying before the war.

Everything else is just memes. The B-17's famous durability and defensive armament was pretty much a non-issue, as bomber without adequate escort are going to be fucked regardless.

Functionally they were. The cheek mounts and dorsal gun behind the top turret were superfluous and of dubious utility given their narrow fields of fire.

B-17 Unit cost $238,329
B-24 Unit cost $297,627

The B-24 also had a 33 mph faster Cruise speed.

This guy give the best reasons for the B-17 being used as late as it was. Truth is that in WWII it was commonly worth making more then one vehicle for a given role. Pick which one would better for a given mission as needed.

As far as bombing gigs go, superfortress over Japan was one of the safer gigs.

The Japanese only had a handful of fighters that could even fly up to the altitude where superfortresses cruised. The most common fighters, A6M, Ki-84, and N1K could not fly at 9000 meters. Only the J2M had the high altitude performance.

ayo hol up

god being in the late-war luftwaffe must have fucking sucked. They lost a lot of experienced pilots and quality aircraft throwing them at b17s which were much more replaceable then they were

Most of their aircraft lost were hordes of BF 109s, not exactly a top quality plane at that point

The Defense of the Reich cost them more planes, but late war Eastern Front definitely sounds more miserable for the Luftwaffe pilots who remained there.
>Crimea 1944
>One Gruppe of JG 52 and one of SG 2 deployed for a total of fewer than 100 aircraft
>Soviets have two air armies in the theater with ~400+ aircraft each
>As campaign goes on, more Luftwaffe forces are withdrawn west while fighting only intensifies
>by Spring 1944 Luftwaffe presence is reduced to what's left of III./JG 52 - a whole 16 Bf 109s
>Soviets by this point have well over a thousand aircraft on hand
>Luftwaffe pilots are by this point flying nonstop from sunrise to sunset, only stopping long enough to refuel and rearm

>we could have had kee bird too but the retarded mechanics burned it on takeoff

>safer gigs
Not true, Superfortresses engines were notorious for crapping out.

>Conquer half of Europe
>Still can't outproduce or even match your enemies in planes.
>lose most of your experienced pilots
No wonder Germany got their fucking shit pushed in on all sides

Worst of all they couldn't even match the britishbritish output even before the us and soviets got involved

In their defense
>Eastern europe had shit industrial capacity outside of Czechoslovakia
>Soviets managed to relocate most of their industry to avoid capture by Germans
>French aircraft industry was a clusterfuck that was far less productive than it could have been
>had to balance needs of Luftwaffe and ground forces, while Brits (closest power to their industrial capacity) could afford to focus far more of their resources on aircraft production because lolisland
>went to war with the two largest industrial powers in the world

On a related note, do aircraft production numbers for Germany mean functioning aircraft or just airframes? I think I recall something about the Germans pumping out a whole bunch of engine-less airframes towards the end of the war.

Can we get more first hand accounts from late war luftwaffe posted? Very interesting, couldn't imagine flying towards and engaging those bomber formations.

Still believe the best scene in fury is the bomber formation overhead.

youtube.com/watch?v=so5w-h7GFEc

>superfluous and of dubious utility

Not in a thousand bomber raid. Stop looking at this in a vacuum. The B-17 had, in practice, double the defensive throw weight. Experiences showed that time and again volume of fire was the next-best-thing after a fighter escort.

This statistic is even more ridiculous when you consider that Britain built some twenty thousand four engined heavy bombers whilst enduring unrestricted submarine warfare.

B-17 looks way cooler
that's reason enough

No, they fucking weren't? US literally lost less than 50 bombers over japan, you dumb fuck.

...because the bongs were getting everything they needed thanks to the US.

That last bit isn't actually true. Britain turned out HUGE amounts of armaments for land combat as well, and actually built more tanks than the Germans did (although this in large part was due to the German penchant for building lots of SPGs), as well as far more things like artillery and mortars.

what is lend-lease