Dilandu wrote:lyonheart wrote:The actual number of confirmed Me-262 kills is absurdly low for what was a revolutionary advance in fighters, although the swept wings were bent backwards initially to shift the center of gravity to where it had to be, not because it improved speed etc.
Well, when Me-262 was introduced in service, it was actually still on prototype stage at best. In fact, by the end of the war, "Meteor" and "Shooting Star" was much more combat-ready than any german jets.
The post war assessments rated the Me 262 as one of the best fighters of WWII, and much better than the Meteor (the Shooting Star was an under powered turkey in comparison) as its engines were more efficient and had a better power to weight, its swept wings gave it a higher critical mach number and it was way more heavily armed.
The down sides were that it was too fast and lacked air brakes, meaning that it had to go to idle power for landing and make a glide approach. On attack it had two seconds in firing range for the same reason.
Adding air brakes is a relatively simple modification that would have transformed it as a fighter, as would engines that lasted longer than 25 hours before needing rebuilding. (No Chromium or Titanium really put a spanner in the works there - the hot parts of the engine were aluminum plated mild steel, the aluminum oxidized to alumina ceramic in service but shattered if heat cycled fast, limiting the engine throttle response to 12 seconds from idle to full power).
Messerschmidt's next project was better still - the Russian's tweaked the design and the MIG-15 was the result.
The He 219 Uhu was probably a better fighter for the time (with a claimed kill rate of a bomber per hour of flight time - with five on its first operational mission) but again it didn't have priority or the fuel to be effective.
] to get the required samples although explaining why might be awkward; "no, we're not going to put a voodoo type curse on him, or anything against the proscriptions" etc.