Test bed my prettythang, RA. You are right, that ain't no F8 (have found that pic captioned in one of my books and its an A5/U3 in Russia,summer 1943). But, incidentally there were lots of 190A5/U3s. Some of them doing low level jabo raids in southern england. Some of them flying in Russia. Some of them in the Med.
That became such a common "test bed", ra,that the germans decided to build it as a standard version instead of an Umrust-Bausatze. It was later also known as Fw190G3.
WIth time the 190G3 walked ahead towards other versions. The latter of them was the Fw190G8, wich also had wing ETC503 racks. Finally the G series was stopped and replaced by the F8/U1 series, wich, incidentally was virtually identical to the Fw190G8.
So, I repeat...test bed my prettythang,Ra. The Fw190A5/U3 saw widespread service.
The Fw190A5 in AH, BTW, also lacks the wing bomb racks of the U3 version. And the Fw190F8 lacks the wing DTs and 250kg bombs.
[ 12-04-2001: Message edited by: R4M ]