Originally posted by Angus
On the flip side, how would the P38 have performed with a Griffon ?
Cruising on the buffering line?
I don't know, and neither does anyone else that I know of. Honestly, since it was literally designed around an Allison (if you've ever seen the skin off the engine cover of a P-38 you'll know what I mean), it'd be hard to get anything else in it and not screw up the aero package or the CG, if not both. There was so much more that could have been done by simply turning up the Allison V-1710 (put the G series in it) and getting rid of the awful Curtiss props that nothing else would ever have been needed, or used. A G series V-1710, running at 3400 RPM and 84" of boost would make 2200HP at least (the unlimited hydro guys dynoed them higher than that in stock form) and a Hamilton Standard prop could have harnessed all of it, especially a 13'6" four blade. That would have made it easily possible to compress in level flight. But it would have pushed the climb rate to over 4000fpm, and made it accelerate about 15% faster, if not more.
There's no need to reinvent the wheel here, the basic combination of plane and engine is plenty sound, it just never was fully refined. All serious efforts to improve the P-38 essentially stopped with the P-38K, there were detail refinements afterward, but the WPB's decision to decline the P-38K, combined with Lockheed's resources being squandered on dead end projects, and the fact that Lockheed was building B-17's while a cargo plane company was trying unsuccessfully to build P-38's, pretty much ended real development work on the P-38, and that was April of 1943. The J was already nearing production, and the L was simply a J-25-Lo with minor detail refinements.
It's sad, really. The P-38K was a wicked plane in its own right. Figure the engine would have seen further improvements, and the Hamilton Standard props would have eventually changed from 3 to 4 blades to streamline manufacturing. So the P-38K, which was a vast improvement performance wise over both the J and L, would have been superceded by an L that was a refinement of the K and not the J.
There's no doubt the Merlin and the Griffon were excellent designs, and well executed. But the attempts to label the Allison engine as second class simply because GM/Allison was not
ALLOWED to fit a two speed two stage supercharger ignore obvious facts.
