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Mephisto said:
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Sivran said:
More like lopsided  Despite the agility of the slower piston-driven fighters, the jets could quite easily cut them apart with guns, as they are easily capable of flying slow enough without stalling to get in some hits. With slashing, high speed (relatively) attacks from any angle they wish the jets would rule the day. The slower aircraft would simply have nowhere to go. This is not to say that there wouldn't be casualties among the Tomcats and Hornets, but they would be very few.
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In the Korean war the first jet planes had major difficulties with the old piston-driven planes as they were flying to fast to score a hit with guns easily. If they would reduce speed they were in constant danger of a stall made worse but the recoil of their guns.
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That is what I was thinking about when I made my original post. But I think Sirvan is correct. I think that modern jets like the F-14 are much more capable at slow speed combat then the Korean war combat jets were. With the variable sweep wings and full flaps they could probably fly slow enough to be able to target the slow flying japanese zeros so one on one it would probably be no contest. I still think that the Zeros would have a manuverabilty advantage at those speeds though and IIRC they would have the Nimitz fighters pretty heavily outnumbered. I'm not sure how many F-14's it carries, but the Japanese had hundreds of planes in the air that day. They'd probably do better taking out a few with sidewinders and scaring the rest off with a few highspeed passes then mixing it up in a real dogfight. And then sinking the Japanese carriers before they could get back of course.