Tucker XP-57 Peashooter
Rob Arndt
Never built and re-use of P-26 name. Tucker was that guy who built
that car ;)
Gee, seems he had bad luck...
Rob
David E. Powell
Designed for ease of manufacture and light weight, the plane fused a
lightweight philosophy similar to Japan's Zero with a mid-engine
configuration a la the Bell P-39 Airacobra, allowing armament to be
concentrated in the nose even with a smaller size. Armament was to be
either three .50 caliber machine guns, or two 20mm cannon and a .50
caliber MG, concentrated and firing straight ahead.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker_XP-57
Tucker may have had rough luck, much of it was from being both ahead
of his time and out of the "system." In 1940 with war clouds gathering
I can see how the U.S. gov't would have figured giving a guy like that
a bit of money for a "right now" fighter project would make quite a
bit of sense.
As other designs reached mass production, the Wiki page says interest
in the project waned.
It seems that in 1939-1940 there were several light fighter programs
that were pursued.
Ad absurdum per aspera
> In 1940 with war clouds gathering
> I can see how the U.S. gov't would have figured giving a guy like that
> a bit of money for a "right now" fighter project would make quite a
> bit of sense.
Probably by 1941 they could have turned it into the best fighter of
1936.
That may be too harsh. As with any number of intriguing designs
built from an advanced composite of reinforced blueprints and dreams,
it would be hard to say for sure what it would have done (and how much
it would have changed, probably for the larger and heavier, from X to
Y to acceptance). But a quick glance at the specs makes me suspect it
might have been (year for year) a second-best player of the Zero's own
game.
Which is not to say that it -- or evolutions of it, if the design
proved to have any stretch -- couldn't have done well in some fights
in some hands; but the US has seldom embraced the light fighter of any
era.
I wish I could remember the name of the writer who marveled at how the
European fighters were like sports cars and American ones, to his
tastes, more like farm tractors -- and how the tractor-built planes
nonetheless won the war. (As part of a huge combined-arms effort, of
course; but aren't all the most fun problems intractably
multivariate?)
And that's before you even get into flying qualities, pilot vision
(something that tended to get more emphasis as the war went on, and
does not look like a cardinal virtue of this design), etc.
--Joe