I wonder why the Navy dumped the Buffalo and went with the F4F? In AH, which is the superior plane?
Mainly because Brewster were not a very good company to deal with, their factory was very chaotic and not able to produce enough planes. To make matters worse Brewster reps sold planes to just about every foreign power they could which annoyed the Navy brass no end.
The early Wildcat was considered an inferior plane to the early Buffalo, but then the Navy started specifying more armour etc, which meant more weight. This meant adding powerful engines, which were in turn heavier. Grumman were able to update their design to cope with this better than Brewster. The Buffalo suffered from landing gear failures as its weight increased where the Wildcat didn't. The final nail in its coffin was that the Buffalo's fuel tanks were integral to the wing structure, rather like the Betty bomber's. This made it much harder to add self sealing fuel tanks than to the Wildcat.
The early lightweight Brewster we have is a more maneuverable plane than the heavier F4F-4 which has more guns, armour and the weight of a folding wing mechanism to lug around. The earlier F4F-3 would do better, as it was a lighter with the same power.
