Keep the Kangaroo alive!
- Thread starter Pangur
- Start date
For this to work it needs to be developed earlier (not sure how you make that happen) and Australia's aircraft industry needs to be robust enough to produce them in appreciable numbers. Otherwise it is what it was in the OTL - one of the many nice piston engine fighters that came along toward the end of WWII that offered nothing over existing designs at a time when the technology had already reached its logical limits.
Kind of like the P-40Q, if that thing had been ready for production in 1941 or 1942 it would have been bad @$$ - but the prototype didn't fly until 1944 and by then it was behind the curve.
Kind of like the P-40Q, if that thing had been ready for production in 1941 or 1942 it would have been bad @$$ - but the prototype didn't fly until 1944 and by then it was behind the curve.
Pangur
Donor
Zheng He, I think that is about the size of it and to get to the point you would need to have a decent aircraft industry in Australia by 1939. In the OTL the first locally developed aircraft like say the Boomerang were stop gap at best with people learning in the fly. You may have to go further and have both a better understanding of the dangers of Japan but also a willingness to go it alone and not depend on Britain for defense. When the latest POD would have to be at the earliest I am not sure - 1930 maybe?
Cook
Banned
In fact the CA-15 was extremely good, being probably one of the best piston engine fighters ever to be built; its max speed was 10 knots faster than the P-51D and its service ceiling was close to the same; significantly its rate of climb was nearly half again that of the P-51D, (4,900 ft/min compared to the P-51’s 3,200 ft/min.) and it had hard points for 10 ground attack rockets as opposed to the P-51 with 6 hard points. Both were armed with 6 x 0.50 in. guns.
The problem was that the first generation jet fighters had arrived and piston engine fighters were seen as a thing of the past; this was despite the C-15 being 28 knots faster than the Gloster Meteor which entered service with the RAAF in 1946, just as the CA-15 was being cancelled.
Since the P-15D, Hawker Sea Fury and Gloster Meteor all saw service in Korea with the RAAF or Australian Fleet Air Arm, squadrons equipped instead with the CA-15 in combat over Korea would seem to have been a valid alternative and would have been useful to keep the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation producing aircraft through until they retooled to produce the CA-27 Sabre.
If you crammed a Griffon engine into a P-51 how much would performance improve? I think most of the performance gain was from the more powerful engine.
Now there is a potential POD for you. Once Packard has the merlin in full production have them second source the griffon engine and do a version of the Mustang with the engine.
I think what you want to do with your POD is have some forward thinking Australian defense planners in the late 1930s decide that while counting on the US and British navies to protect Australia is all well and good, Australia also needs to help itself out and since it can't build the ships it needs, airpower is the way to go. This leads to serious investments in an indigenous aircraft industry and an indigenous aero-engine industry that allows Australia to begin producing modern fighters earlier than OTL as opposed to stop gaps like the Boomerang which were already outdated when production started.
The one thing you will need to tackle is engines. Were radial engines far enough along for your timeline to work or do you need a POD where they (at least initially) go with an inline engine, perhaps an Australian produced variant of the Allison engine that went in the early P-40s? This would give you different fighter that probably looks and acts a lot like a P-40 (although that is better than the Boomerang which looked and acted a lot like a P-36) but keep in mind that I don't consider that to be an insult, I am a huge P-40 fan, I consider it to be the unsung hero of the Allied war effort in the air.
I understand. I started out responding to a previous posting about the difference in performance between the CA-15 and the P-51. Several other posters commented on the difficulty of competing with a design that was already in series production. The CA-15 just doesn't bring enough difference to the market. And having to switch engines from a radial to an inline didn't help. (I'm trying to imagine that fuselage with an R-2800 on it
) Maybe if they had started with a Bristol Hercules radial and improved its performance by setting it up for higher octane, higher compression and started a year or so earlier (maybe if the Boomerang effort had started in mid 1940 when it appeared that Britian wouldn't be able to supply aircraft) it could have been a reasonable contendor. But by the time the CA-15 was reeady for testing the P-51 was already in high volume production and just too cheap to offer CAC a chance.Pangur, I think you've got an interesting ATL here but I think you need to walk it back so things happen about five years earlier.
POD #1 - Australian aircraft industry for whatever reasons gets the attention it needs in the 1930s so that it can begin producing the Boomerang in 1937 (when it was still a nice little light weight fighter) instead of in 1942 so it can start reaching operational units in 1938 instead of 1943. This could also have some interesting consequences because the Dutch ITTL may see the Boomerang as a viable fighter for the East Indies and RAF could even go that route in Malaya. That wouldn't stop the Japanese but you could have better equipped and better trained RAAF, RAF, and Dutch fighter units facing the Japanese in 1942 with a locally produced fighter.
POD #2 - you need an interim fighter between the Boomerang and the CA-15, something like a bigger juiced up Boomerang with an inline engine. Basically what the P-40 was to the P-36. This would start reaching operational units sometime in 1941. This will lead to better equipped RAAF units at Darwin, Port Moresby, and maybe even Rabaul.
POD #3 - the above PODs lead to this POD which is an established production base with good experience producing earlier generation fighters which leads to the capacity to maybe start producing CA-15s in say 1943 depending on the engine issues and how you work that out.
Anyhow, those are my thoughts, I'm interested in watching how you develop this ATL.
POD #1 - Australian aircraft industry for whatever reasons gets the attention it needs in the 1930s so that it can begin producing the Boomerang in 1937 (when it was still a nice little light weight fighter) instead of in 1942 so it can start reaching operational units in 1938 instead of 1943. This could also have some interesting consequences because the Dutch ITTL may see the Boomerang as a viable fighter for the East Indies and RAF could even go that route in Malaya. That wouldn't stop the Japanese but you could have better equipped and better trained RAAF, RAF, and Dutch fighter units facing the Japanese in 1942 with a locally produced fighter.
POD #2 - you need an interim fighter between the Boomerang and the CA-15, something like a bigger juiced up Boomerang with an inline engine. Basically what the P-40 was to the P-36. This would start reaching operational units sometime in 1941. This will lead to better equipped RAAF units at Darwin, Port Moresby, and maybe even Rabaul.
POD #3 - the above PODs lead to this POD which is an established production base with good experience producing earlier generation fighters which leads to the capacity to maybe start producing CA-15s in say 1943 depending on the engine issues and how you work that out.
Anyhow, those are my thoughts, I'm interested in watching how you develop this ATL.