The numbers are from here (I advise saving the page):
link
Some NFs can do better the intercepting, some worse, but all German night fighters were far better than Flak to kill night bombers.
Yeah, too bad about Sturmvogel, there was great info there. I did have that bookmarked, but had forgotten about it. I'm counting 196 twin engine nightfighters on hand on June 22nd 1941 with some Me109s attached the NJ force on top of that.
As to the impact of FLAK I'd suggest this:
https://www.amazon.com/Flak-German-...=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1303099435&sr=1-1
NFers generally played off of FLAK, picking off wounded bombers that fell behind due to FLAK shrapnel damage. I was really surprised to read somewhere recently that in 1944 some 13000(!) heavy bombers suffered damage from FLAK not counting destroyed bombers. So while yes night fighters were more likely to get a kills, FLAK did a lot of damage to Allied bombers and created conditions (i.e. lamed bombers) that were easy pickings for fighters to pick off both by day and night; therefore it isn't as simple as saying fighters > FLAK.
Lichtenstein radars were okay, after all the kills of the NFs jumped when radar was introduced.
Fire control radar was introduced for Flak in 1942, and experiments were done in 1941. Meaning 1942 was probably the best year of the Flak, after that British went crazy with cuntermeasures, while Germans though it was a good idea to have school kids and PoWs man their Flak. It took 4000 heavy shells to kill an Allied aircraft in 1942 (best year), soaring to 16000 (16 thousand) to do the same in 1944. By 1944, German NF arm was at ~400 fighters, they took advantage of BC reaching too far and defeated them above Berlin.
With that said - yes, Germany probably wasted their chances with radar.
Radar was better than no radar, both for FLAK and fighters. Even the flawed Lichtenstein system was better than nothing. Yes fire control was introduced in 1942...but was still rare; only about 30% of FLAK batteries had such guidance by the end of 1942 IIRC, as the Würzburg Reise systems were huge and expensive to make:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Würzburg_radar#Operational_models
Only 1500 were made during the war, the VAST majority after 1942. FLAK accuracy dropped in terms of bomber killing for a number of reasons, including the Allies flying higher and faster; the various figures of shells per kill also include daylight bombers, which were very hard to hit with regular 88s because of how high they flew (128mm guns were able to shoot down bombers with 2000 rounds per kill even in 1944). By 1944 the drop off in crew quality, barrel wear, radar jamming, drop in explosive filler of shells due to production shortages, and so much more all played major roles in the drop in accuracy. The Germans never thought it was a good idea to use school kids and PoWs on FLAK, they just had no choice. But again with better gunnery radar that wasn't being jammed at least at night they'd have a lot better chance to score hits. Chaff and various jamming systems really degraded ability to hit bombers at night from 1943 on. You can't hit what you can't see.
There was fire control radar for the Flak available in numbers by 1942, so I did not mentioned it - took it for granted. Use of proxy-fused shells means that Flak crews always aim to hit, in case of near miss the shell will detonate.
Not in numbers, only a fraction of FLAK guns had radar guidance of sufficient quality in 1942. By the end of the year IIRC only about 30% of batteries had radar guidance. I posted a thread a while back about German experiments at the end of the war with direct hit aiming instead of box barrages, they called a contact fuse shell a 'Doppelzünder' (double fuse) as it had both the contact and timed fuse and by day that achieved triple the shoot downs and by night double (depended though on accurate radar guidance), but they lost the 'indirect' impact of shrapnel damage from box barrages. So even with non-VT fuses they could achieve considerably more kills with better radar guidance and direct hits...but they lose all the damage they inflicted via shrapnel. But again the main issue isn't the shell being able to explode with a near miss, the trick is getting shells near the bomber at altitude, which was very tricky so high up given that gunlaying computing at that time wasn't particularly great.
We should mention US developments with AAA though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCR-584_radar
Based on info I've read about it being used against German night bombers that were hitting Paris in mid-1944 after it was liberated by the Allies they managed to score kills with timed fused shells, not proximity fused shells, at 360 shells per bomber on average. That is as good as the proximity shells were getting in the Pacific against Japanese aircraft. So with a solid gunnery radar and integrated AAA guidance system really good kill rates could be achieved.
No quarrels about that. Just - Luftwaffe needed pehaps twice the Bf-110 NFs in 1941-43 in order to defeat the BC.
I'm not so sure about that. Just getting the sorts of kill rates achieved by night fighters in early 1944 due to improved radar with the 1941 numbers of Bf110s listed in your link above would have been crippling for the small BC forces in 1941-42. Again though that isn't even counting potentials for Intruder operations against the inexperienced Bomber Command and weaker British night air defenses in 1942 vs. 1944-45 when Operation Gisela did achieve remarkable success.
They probably would've been. OTOH - RAF in late 1942/early 1943 was not the same as 1941, they could actually find a target and plant a decent tonnage of bombs at it.
Sure in comparison, but in 1942-43 they weren't even as accurate as they were in 1944-45. Nevertheless BC could have given up resources in 1942-43 to end the Battle of the Atlantic quite a bit earlier, while using Mossies for accurate night bombing in small raids...which could have all used Oboe for precision bombing of industrial targets, rather than mass bombing of city centers. Can you imagine what damage would have been done in 1943 by an all Mossie strike force that were precision guided by Oboe against German oil targets? Leuna and the like were all vulnerable. In fact Leuna was a large as a city center target, why the hell didn't BC use their heavies to smash it to bits??? They had the accuracy and damn sure had the tonnage ability IOTL in 1943 to wreck that facility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leuna_works#World_War_II
Leuna covered three square miles of land with 250 buildings, including decoy buildings outside the main plant, and employed 35,000 workers (including 10,000 prisoners and slave laborers).
Even despite the heavy FLAK defenses the US smashed it repeatedly IOTL and by 1943 chaff and jamming tech would have rendered it blind by night.