T-A, still hungover, huh?
Give it some more thought,
& come back with some actual fact-based parameters..
Like Vmax, Vne, climb, dive & zoom speeds, turn radius , roll rate,
fire-power, combat vision, engine management/user friendliness & etc..
For example, from the invasion to VE-day both the P-38 & Tempest were
tasked with tactical operations, & the Tempest bagged every type of LW jet & FW long-nose flying, while the P-38 did not..
Do you think performance attributes might've had something to do with that?
Well, duhh..
Assuming our AH charts are accurate (and they almost always are), the P-38L looks to be about 10mph faster than the Tempest at 25K. At 30K the disparity has grown to roughly 20mph, still in favor of the P-38L. Its comical to note that the Tempest's speed at 30,000ft is not significantly greater than that of the 190A-5 or 109G-2, both 1942 fighters.
Climb rates look to be roughly equal at 16,000ft, but above that, the P-38 has an advantage in climb rate of no less than 500 feet per minute, and is such that at 25,000ft, the P-38L is climbing at a rate almost 1000 feet per minute greater than that of the Tempest. At 30K, the tempest's climb rate has dropped to roughly 750 feet per minute, while the P-38 is still climbing at a rate of ~1600 feet per minute.
In terms of climb rate, the Tempest is actually the inferior of both the Fw 190A-5 and Bf 109G-2 at 30k, both performing about as well as the P-38.
The Hawker Tempest has a shorter range than the P-38L by 560 miles. Or if you wish to look at it this way, the P-38's range was 173% that of the Temest's. In other words, the Tempest would be totally unsuitable to the role of escort fighter, which constituted much of the war.
As for the rest, you seem to be under the impression that the typical WWII fight was like an AH dogfight, which is not true. From what I can find, and what other members have posted in other threads, typical WWII combat much more closely resembled the slash, dive, and run tactics used by pony dweebs in AH. Especially at 30k, where the rarefied atmosphere makes maneuvering more difficult, this would undoubtedly be the norm. In such a fight, the P-38's lower roll rate would not adversely affect it to any significant degree.
Nose mounted weapons means the P-38 suffers no convergence issues, unlike the Tempest. The P-38 also had a superior view over the nose, which eases deflection shooting (most of the shots in WWII ETO).
No idea as to the turn radius at 30k, but again, it would be rather irrelevant.
The P-38 also possesses redundant engines. One hit in the wrong spot, and your tempest is going to be written off as total loss, no matter how hard your pilot "thrashed" his engine. If anything, that would merely exacerbate any combat damage, hastening his forced landing. But a P-38, on the other hand, could theoretically take even a 120mm APFSDS round from an M1 abrams through an engine block and make it back home.
Oh, the P-38 also had significantly greater ordnance carrying capacity than the Tempest, and more importantly, it could distribute that load more usefully than the Tempest's 2 1000lb bombs. In WWII, even 500lb bombs were overkill for many targets. When attacking front lines, the Germans even opted for a larger number of 50kg fragmentation bombs over the larger 250 or 500kg weapons. The biggest issue is that infantry tends to take cover, which shields them from casing fragments, and blast in large measure. Thus 8 50kg bombs dropped in 8 locations will do more damage to entrenched infantry than 2 500lb bombs dropped in 2 different locations.
