First, I want to clarify that I was not saying German radar could not vector fighters in on Mosquitoes, just that it was difficult to do so. British radar would have been no better off for that. The problem is that radar in that day did not paint a clear picture of what was being seen and a lot of what was interpeted from it was based on the skill of the operator making best guesses. If the intercept was precise then the German fighter had a chance at killing a Mosquito B.IV, but even then, the speed advantage of a German fighter at 21,000ft was very limited. If AH2 is correct the Bf109G-6 could barely outdue a Mosquito B.Mk IV at 21,000ft, with the difference being so slight that a badly fitting panel on either aircraft very well could decide the outcome. The Bf109G-2 and Fw190A-5 have more of an advantage, but still not all that much.
If the intercept vector is just a bit off and one of those short legged German fighters ends up in a full power tail chase they aren't going to catch the Mosquito if the Mosquito has even a 10 mile lead, and it could be much shorter and still be true as I am using rough estimates here, as fuel will become a deciding factor. This would be just as true for a Spitfire doing an intercept on a Mosquito like bomber.
Add in the fact that Euopean skies were very rarely clear and cloudless as far as the eye could see as in AH and instead were a "terrain" of towering clouds that could easily interfere with a German pilot spotting a Mosquito he was vectored towards and got within a mile or two of.
Basically the Mosquito's speed wasn't so much that it could really win a race with a Bf109G or Fw190A if they were started side by side, it was that the speed made the intercept window very small so that even slightly wrong intercept vectors would doom the intercept to failure. If the information on an incoming raid was passed futher in so that fighters could be scrambled to be at the right altitude when the Mosquitoes got there it increased the odds of success, but even then if the vectors were off by much they'd miss the intercept window simply due to fuel consumption when running at WEP.
Yes, sometimes Mosquitoes flat out, out ran the German fighters, but we don't know the powersettings or conditions of the respective aircraft so we cannot definitively say why that happened in a given case. Often wen don't even know the exact types of aircraft.
As to my formation comment, what I was refering to is that Mosquitoes did not have to maintain tight box formations so as to have supporting fields of fire for the purposes of mutual defense. Lacking the requirement to maintain a tight formation freed the crews to put the throttles through the stops if they saw a pursuing German fighter. He111s, Do17s and Ju88s in the Battle of Britain and B-17s and B-24s in the American air offensives did not have that option as the pilot had to maintain formation. Mosquitoes did at times operate in loose formations in order to obtain some focused bombardment effect, but the formations always had the flexibility to allow the Mosquitoes to use their defenseive tool, speed, when called for.
Obviously if the British had built 10,000 Mosquito bombers and used them as the main strength of RAF Bomber Command their losses would have been much higher as both an absolute number and as a percentage because a German fighter vectored onto a stream of Mosquitoes is far more likely to be in a good intercept window on one of them than a German fighter vectored onto a single or small number of them.
In terms of the He177A-5 and AH2, well, the radar only gives a 25 mile warning before the first targets are reached. This pretty much means that any target within about 50 miles of the border is basicly defenseless against a fast bomber at 20,000+ft when it comes to reactionary fighter scrambles. If there just happens to be a player with altitude somewhere in the area then there can be problems, but that usually doesn't happen. The HQ is, of course, a separate issue due to the presence of Me163As nearby.
