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My guess is the same problem with the P-43, if a pilot tries to three point it while landing, the fat wing chord and short fuselage blankets the rudder just as you said.
All true but nothing to do with the Corsair.
I would describe it as sub-optimal machines condemned to operate under sub-optimal circumstances.
It had a head start timewise, so there was a pre-existing body of experience and supporting infrastructure, it was a somewhat more honest handling machine, and in many cases, of long and precarious supply chains and primitive conditions, the best available substitute for the late arriving REAL thing.
Sort of like the Wirraway to Boomerang.
True. What's worse for the Brits, the Vought Chesapeake or Brewster Bermuda? Lets send them both to the IPO, might as well get rid of them. The Bermuda was a year late, but two FAA squadrons of Chesapeakes (presumably with former Skua pilots) would give an otherwise absent dive bomber capability to the Malayan defences.
Bingo. If the performance numbers cited had been for a P-34 they might have been considered respectable. But the P-66 came well after the P-47 and P-51, so a 340mph top speed was a step backward.
Nice depictions. Do you have details on P-66 engines? 1830 dash what? Were all P-66s equipped with the same HP P&Ws? Actual HP? Prop Ham Standard what? H-1 had a Twin Wasp Jr. 1535 dash what? 825 HP? The H1 as flown had more than the book value. Dick Palmer told me so. Among other things they bumped the timing up to 28 degrees from 25. Prop was a Ham Standard D12D40, I think. Length? Blades? Do you have any details of the H1 XC record? Altitudes, and routes? TAS?
P-66 production saw deliveries by summer of '41 - the P-47 didn't start deliveries until December '41 and the Mustang Mk.I was being delivered in October of 1941.
I remember seeing fly off comparison tests of P-66 and contemporaries. Cannot remember where. Think it happened at Wright-Pat, USAAC sponsored, but have no idea where I saw the data published. P-66 did OK v fighter with similar hp. I know Dick Palmer thought they'd given him a P-36 engine, and he'd designed a plane that was better than the P-36 around it. He thought the frontal area of the 1830 was a nearly impossible problem, which was why he played around with prop extensions and fairings in the prototype, also why he used the Twin Wasp Jr on the Racer. Not germane to this thread, but he told me he'd designed the H1 with the possibility of turning it into a fighter in mind. He imagined the Twin Wasp Jr. with a two stage, two speed blower, tweaked for 1000 HP, critical altitude of 20-25K. XC version of H1 had fuel capacity of 275-285 gallons, I forget which. Call it 1670 LB of fuel. Put 1/3-2/5 of that into guns and armor, and you still can carry as much fuel as a P-51.
You are correct. It turns out that the Vultee plane was already flying, and foreign orders had been placed, by early 1940. But the AAF did not assign the P- designation to the plane until after Pearl Harbor, so it got #66. But by that time the Vanguard's performance was not as good as other planes in the pipeline, so it simply was not good enough to merit mass production. Meanwhile, the P-47 designation had been issued sometime in very late '39 or early '40, but Republic took the XP-47 and and discarded the design and essentially started over, so the P-47 didn't actually fly until after the (eventual) P-66 did.
North American was another new company who did the same thing, albeit much more successfully.
