Plane most affected(badly) by the original specification?

OK after a suggestion in another thread: which plane, which could have been successful IF the designer had had a free hand, was most badly affected by the government/air force requirements or meddling?

Two to start with;
1:The Defiant which if it had had even two forward firing guns could have been as successful as the Bristol Fighter in WWI.
2:The Stirling which if it had proper wings and an undivided bomb bay would have possibly killed the Lancaster. It wasn't a disaster but was certainly hampered by what was asked of Shorts. They did produce a redesign which would have been effective (assuming the Centauri didn't catch fire!) but were stopped because it would disrupt the production of the original design!
Any other ideas?
 
A few come to mind

Short Stirling (wingspan dictated by hanger doors)
Mitsubishi A6M (insane and unrealistic range and performance requirement for available engine)
Mitsubishi G4M (insistence on a twin-engine design for a 4-engine requirement)
Heinkel He 177 (Aak. Where to begin?)
Avro Manchester (not quite as bad off as the He 177)
Westland Whirlwind (engine requirement)
Bell P-39 (required armament)

But the He 177 certainly takes the cake.
 
Boulton Paul promoted the turret concept, so the specification was not at fault. Could the Blackburn Roc have been as successful a fighter as the Skua?

The Stirling wingspan limitation is perhaps partly somewhat mythical, maybe, because the wings were longer than the door openings. What ruined the Stirling was that it was 17 feet too long. The heavy bomber specification was hamstrung by airfield limitations and the ability to take off with a heavy load from short runways required some screwing around. The medium bomber spec, for Halifax and Manchester was intended to use catapult launch and assisted take-off methods to facilitate launch. It wasn't until much too late that the people who decide such things noticed that nobody had developed these special launch devices, and that it was silly, ridiculous and ineffective. By then, the medium bombers were morphed into the heavy bomber equivalent with the failure of the Vulture, and he rest is history by coincidence. They ended up building longer runways with concrete.

Airfield limitations combined with design incompetence also led to the pitiful performance of the Whitley and Hampden, and didn't help the Whirlwind, which wasn't designed to operate off a grass-covered postage stamp.
 
Was the A5 Vigilante spec'd with that ridiculous bomb bay, or was the clever idea from the designer?
 

Driftless

Donor
I'm not sure if this one fits with the OP, but....

Breda Ba.88 Lince - a relatively hot plane when rolled out, but it's performance went completely and dangerously into the tank as military equipment was installed.
 
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One could argue that the main flaws with the Bf109 were products of its specification.

For example, it was stated that the aircraft would have to stand on its undercarriage with the wings removed. This was the origin of the strange splayed out/toe in arrangement we ended up with.

The spec called for an endurance of 90 minutes, so there was no real pressure for large internal tankage or a roomy airframe. The original engine specified was a Jumo 210 giving about 700 hp, and Messerschmitt and Lusser tailored the aircraft to this. This engine had a displacement of only 19.7 Litres, well below the 27 Litres of the Merlin or the 34 Litres of the DB601. It ultimately ended up with a DB605 of 36 Litres. One could argue that was too big and too powerful for the airframe.

It was never intended to carry guns in the wings. The spec was for two cowling mounted MGs and a motor cannon. The E and some early Fs carried 2x20mm cannon in the wings, but most versions didn't, presumably because it affected the flight characteristics. The later versions either relied on the fuselage mounted weapons or supplemented them with underwing mounted cannon. It's armarment was severely restricted compared to an Fw190.
 

jahenders

Banned
We won't know the real results for a decade or more, but some today might consider the F-35 a contender -- 3 very different designs in one plane.
 
Was the A5 Vigilante spec'd with that ridiculous bomb bay, or was the clever idea from the designer?

Think it was driven by the requirement of carrying nuclear bombs which would not have worked externally in the design and there was no room for a bomb bay. A "clever" way to meet the design criteria which is the essence of the thread but I'm not sure it was THAT bad of a design considering the a fore mentioned criteria.

Consider the only "hard-point" on the SR-71 ("Stratigic" being part of the criteria of the design that would have either carried a drone or a free-fall bomb) that was possible with the design was on the back, and the only way to launch it was an "over-the-shoulder" as you run away :)

Randy
 
1:The Defiant which if it had had even two forward firing guns could have been as successful as the Bristol Fighter in WWI.

I would think the only way to make the Defiant remotely competitive with it's single seat fighter contemporaries is to remove the turret. Putting forward firing guns is only more weight to an already slow and heavy design (same engine as a Spitfire, but with almost literally a ton more aircraft to lug around).
 

Deleted member 1487

Heinkel He 177 (Aak. Where to begin?)
But the He 177 certainly takes the cake.
That's the thing the original spec was fine, it was all the later requirements added by Udet that was the problem.
 
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