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You are correct that the F4U Corsair was the better aircraft. I say aircraft as the Corsair was superior to the Hellcat in either the fighter role or as a ground attack aircraft. But the “kill ratio you cite reflects more about how the respective aircraft were used as well as where and when they were used than the relative value of the aircraft.First, a little background is needed. Both aircraft used the same Pratt & Whitney Double Wasp radial engine which nominally provided about 2,000 horsepower, yet the Corsair was considerably faster, better than 50 mph faster, in fact. This was largely a function of using different turbo/supercharging systems and the Corsair’s much larger propeller (13′ 4″ in diameter), but it also reflected a superior airframe design, as well.The F6F Hellcat was a design from Grumman meant to address the shortcomings of its F4F Wildcat when fighting the Japanese A6M “Zero.” In turn, the Wildcat was an updated fighter plane from the Grumman F3F, a bi-plane design just before the U. S. entered the war:The successor Wildcat was nearly the same aircraft but with a mid-wing monoplane design:The Hellcat was a “clean sheet design” sharing no parts with the Wildcat, yet it had many similar design elements that look very familiar with the two earlier aircraft from Grumman. In fact, when the Hellcat first entered service, many Japanese pilots thought they were Wildcats and were shocked by the superior performance of the Hellcat:Thus, a number of advantages and disadvantages of the earlier designs had effects for the Hellcat. For example, the earlier Grummans were loved for their low speed handling characteristics, a very important factor for carrier landings. This is not surprising since the Hellcat was designed and developed in near record time in the wake of the shock experienced by U. S. pilots when facing the Zero for the first time.The F4U Corsair was a totally different type of bird. It was designed earlier than the Hellcat, but it had development challenges that were not easily fixed. Yet, its sleeker profile made it one of the fastest piston engine fighter planes of the war. Having its main fuel tank mounted in the fuselage between the pilot and the engine gives it an almost ideal center of gravity which in turn made it handle very nimbly for such a large fighter plane:Being an entirely new design, the Corsair had some issues in development. Without a long detail, the biggest was that the left wing would stall before the right wing at slow speeds, a tough characteristic for carrier based operations when the plane came in to land. Additionally, the long nose made it hard to see forward when taxiing on a carrier deck or coming in to land. Consequently, and with a few other issues, the aircraft was initially not approved for carrier use until the issues were resolved. As production was already well underway, the Corsair was released to the Marines Air Wing while the Navy awaited the more docile handling Hellcat.The Corsair entered service about nine months earlier than the Hellcat (January 1943), but in smaller numbers. The early actions of the Corsair against the Japanese reflected a need of the pilots to learn how to best use it against their adversaries, but also reflected the record of the plane against first line Japanese pilots who were still fighting in the Solomons. Additionally, the Marines first obligation was ground support, a role at which the Corsair excelled. So the Corsair faced tougher opponents in the air, yet had to also spend considerable effort in the ground attack role.The continuing Solomon Islands campaign and the attacks on the large Japanese bases at Rabaul effectively destroyed the foundation of Japanese naval aviation. The Japanese did not rotate their pilots home—they fought until killed, captured or incapacitated. They were worn down in a campaign largely conducted by Corsairs and Wildcats, but the appearance of the Corsairs tilted the conflict in favor of the Americans. By September of 1943, when the Hellcats started to arrive with the new Essex class carriers, the Japanese pilots they faced were increasingly new pilots from Japan who had no prior combat seasoning in China and was often not far removed from flight school. There were still a number of good Japanese pilots still flying, but their numbers were dwindling rapidly by the end of 1943. At the Battle of the Philippine Sea (aka, the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot”) in June of 1944, the Hellcats were facing almost all rookies which allowed the Hellcats to rack up a huge score against the Japanese, credited with destroying approximately 633 Japanese aircraft of all types (between naval and land based aircraft) for a loss of about 45 American aircraft to enemy action (not just Hellcats). Throughout 1944, the Hellcat simply swamped all Japanese military opponents with very little loss.However, the appearance of the Japanese Kamikaze suicide bombers changed the equation for the Navy. Hellcat fighter combat air patrols were unable to keep up with the volume of attackers, so the Navy turned to the Corsair, equipping each carrier with a squadron of Corsairs in early 1945. By this time, the Corsairs had their issues with carrier landings solved and for the remainder of the war it was the Corsairs who protected the fleet.With the end of the war, the F6F was retired from the U. S. Navy, replaced by another Grumman, the F8F Bearcat, but the Bearcat did not have a very long service life, replaced by jet fighters by 1950. The Corsair, however, served with distinction throughout the Korean conflict where one Corsair actually shot down a MiG-15.

The most obvious answer is, of course, the Space Shuttle.That’s right, I said it. No other vehicle in the history of manned space travel has lost two full crews during flight.[1][1][1][1] The whole design is an abomination of committee-designed inefficiencies right from the start. Even Wernher von Braun thought it was an absolutely awful design[2][2][2][2].Start with the original design which was a delta-winged “space plane” at the top of a Saturn V like rocket, comparable to the X-20 DynoSoar project. This design, known as “on-axis” means that the shuttle sits at the top, safe from exhaust blasts and debris from launch, and all of its surfaces except the un-exposed tail-end are free to be designed however is needed for space-flight and re-entry.The DynoSoar had its issues though, and it was never launched in an actual rocket configuration. Several of the test pilots quit the program after the Air Force squabbled about which booster to use, including one named Neil Armstrong.But the design was basically a good one. Von Braun had proposed a shuttle, but his design was more like what we see with Virgin Galactic’s Space Ship Two design, with a carrier that takes the shuttle into the stratosphere, where the main shuttle engines then ignite to carry it to orbit. In von Braun’s plan, the entire system was reusable.That, however, didn’t make Congress and the companies like Boeing and Lockheed very happy. Re-usable meant they couldn’t sell you a new $100,000,000 rocket engine on every flight. Re-usable meant that assembly jobs were a one-time thing, and then congressional districts lost jobs and money. On the other hand, expendable meant the gravy train kept running.So, as Apollo drew to a close, they pointed at the DynoSoar program as the model, and said, “This is the shuttle we want.”But, then the committees got a hold of it. Simply getting people to and from space wasn’t enough. NASA wanted a way to get astronauts into space, but NASA had a limited budget. The Air Force wanted to get satellites to space and they had a much larger budget, so the Air Force got brought into the discussion. The Air Force, however, wanted cargo, not people. Other groups like the NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) and the like said they needed to put up satellites the size of school buses for doing satellite reconnaisance, i.e. spy satellites.That means that the small, manageable X-20 sized shuttle was tossed out in favor of the giant cargo space of what came to be the Space Shuttle. But, more cargo space means more “space-plane” to house it. That raises the mass of the shuttle. More mass means bigger wings to land it, and more powerful rockets to lift it.The whole thing became an almost comical cycle. With the shuttle needing that much lift, the engines became so expensive and time consuming to build that even Lockheed said they could no longer be expendable, and had to be re-used to make the shuttle even vaguely affordable. That meant the engines had to be recovered, which meant they had to be part of the shuttle. With engines mounted in the tail of the shuttle, it couldn’t sit on top of the stack any more.And that’s vitally important. In the event of an accident, a capsule mounted at the top of a rocket stack has a chance to escape. When you’re strapped side-by-side to a giant bomb, as Challenger showed, there’s nowhere to go when something goes wrong.Worse, strapping to the side of the stack (off-axis for those who are picky about such terms) leads to all kinds of other compromises. The piping for fuel must now go directly through the heat shields that cover the bottom of the shuttle, creating headaches in just how to ensure that the covering is safe for a 3500 degree re-entry.The shuttle is now in the path of any debris breaking away from the fuel tank. (This was opposite what you saw on the Saturn V launches, where great sheets of ice would peel away from the cryogenic tanks on the rocket, falling harmlessly along the surface of the rocket.) This meant the fuel tank had to have extreme insulation to prevent ice from forming, because the ice would now crash into the shuttle, cutting through its fragile tiles that protected it from reentry. So, thick foam insulation was placed over the entire tank, adding more weight, and more headaches, because the slightest flaw in how the foam bonded to the surface meant chunks of foam peeling off the tank and striking the shuttle. This was what would lead to the destruction of Columbia.The main weight at launch is in the expendable fuel tank, carrying nearly 1.6 million pounds of hydrogen and oxygen, 20 times the mass of the shuttle itself. If you think of the engines on the shuttle as lifting that weight, then imagine that the center of gravity is nearly 20 feet off-line from the lift of the engines that are lifting it. That meant the shuttle, and the fuel tank, had to have reinforced structures to support all that off-axis thrust. And that meant even more weight to be lifted to orbit in the shuttle, and nearly to orbit in the fuel tank.The numbers got so bad, the only way to solve the problem was to strap on giant, solid-fuel rocket boosters to get this travesty off the pad. But solid fuel has a problem. It has exactly two settings, “Not Lit” and “Full Throttle”. Now, to be technical, the SRBs had fuel mixes pre-loaded that created a thrust profile to match the flight events like Max-Q, and other adjustments, however, this was not an exact science and usually there were 2–3 second windows where the thrust profile would change, and the shuttle main engines would have to compensate.Additionally, the SRBs were prone to “thrust oscillation” (think bouncing up and down like a pogo stick) events, vibration along the direction of travel, which tended to shake everything violently. Again, these were also there to lift the 1.6M pounds (800 tons) of fuel in the external tank. These boosters were also mounted off-axis, meaning they were also lifting on a lever arm 20 feet off-axis from the center of mass.This meant more reinforcement and more weight. In the end, the STS (Space Transit System) was burning about 3.8 million pounds of fuel (1.6M in the external tank, plus 1.1 million in each booster) to lift the 200,000 pound shuttle into orbit. That’s a 5% fuel to weight ratio, which is actually rather good, but remember, the shuttle wasn’t actually the cargo.The cargo was whatever satellite or bit of the space station they were trying to launch into orbit.The maximum weight that a shuttle could take to LEO (low-earth orbit) was 65,000 pounds. So, the shuttle burned 3,800,000 pounds of fuel to get a maximum of 65,000 pounds to orbit. The average cost per flight on a shuttle was about $450,000,000 per mission. That’s a cost per pound of $6923 and change to low earth orbit, and the shuttle almost never flew at maximum cargo weight.To put it in perspective, while the Saturn V was more expensive (about $1.16B per flight in modern dollars) it could carry 261,000 pounds of cargo to orbit, a price per pound of about $4445. And they were throwing the entire rocket away on each flight.To put that into perspective, the entire ISS weighs about 440 tons right now. The Saturn V could have lofted that in four flights, and almost could do it in three. (130.5 tons per flight.) The Space Shuttle had 36 designated ISS missions to loft parts of the station, and several parts were added by Russia, Japan, and even the ESA without the help of NASA. In fact, the current mass includes several portions brought up by SpaceX and Orbital as well.All this doesn’t even mention the fragility of the tile system on the shuttle. Every mission required the inspection of every tile, and the replacement of hundreds if not thousands that were damaged on each flight.The Main Engines had to be totally refurbished after every flight, the entire turbopump assembly removed, and rebuilt. The idea that was sold….…was nothing at all like what was actually delivered.When added to the Shuttle’s dismal safety record, the broken promises of re-usability — Congress was promised it would fly, “once a week with only minor refurbishment between flights” — there’s no choice about the worst rocket design ever put into use, and that’s the Space Shuttle.(Edited to correct the term “Pogo” for SRBs — which is reserved for on-axis oscillations in liquid fueled rockets — to the correct term, which is “Thrust Oscillation”.)Do you like answers about space? Come find all my answers and some additional commentary at “Space Between My Ears”.Footnotes[1] Two Full Crews During Flight[1] Two Full Crews During Flight[1] Two Full Crews During Flight[1] Two Full Crews During Flight[2] Werner Von Braun’s Space Shuttle[2] Werner Von Braun’s Space Shuttle[2] Werner Von Braun’s Space Shuttle[2] Werner Von Braun’s Space Shuttle

No. They cost more becauseThe American market is willing to spend $1500 - $2500 on semiautomatic rifles and “braced pistols” with military lineage that are not ARs or AKs.The HK SP5K and small builders’ guns set a price anchor at $2500.Their marketing exposure is incredible. The MP5 played a prominent role in the Special Air Service storming the London Iranian Embassy in 1980, Die Hard the greatest Christmas movie ever, plus countless other films, TV shows, and video games.Competition was limited.Good businesses price based on what the market will bear, not production cost which merely sets the floor. That’s also higher because MP5 makers don’t benefit from the low unit costs which go with contractors making parts for a million AR15s annually.Pistol Caliber Carbine practical shooting competition where golf with guns meets live action Doom has become increasingly popular, with those firearms including the MP5 along with it. Contemporary BATFE interpretation of “sporting purposes” for 18 USC 925(d)(3) being more inclusive for pistols than rifles and “intended to be fired from the shoulder” for 26 USC 5845(d) excluding “pistol braces” has foreign producers focused on semiautomatic versions of submachine guns with consumers following. We have a larger market benefiting from quantities of scale with more imported competition from HK licensees MKE and Pakistan Ordnance Factories.As that market saturates you’ll be able to buy mass produced MP5s without a collapsing/folding stock/brace for $1000 like PTR-91 7.62x51mm HK91 clones sharing their design and parts. Palmetto State Armory should ship their MP5 in Q3 or Q4 2019 for under $1300 and is reportedly targeting $1100 if everything works out.Today you can buy a Pakistan Ordnance Factory MP5 for $1300. For less money you can probably get a used Bobcat, Coharie, or Special Weapons Todd Bailey gun to run right with an HK ejector, HK or RCM extractor, new extractor spring, and rollers producing correct bolt gap. Note Special Weapons made both sheet metal and cast stainless steel SW5 receivers, with the latter not accepting collapsible stocks.While their halbverriegelt “half locked” design makes them more complex than pure blowback 9mm guns, MP5s are fairly inexpensive firearms to produce. Cost is limited by a non-load bearing stamped sheet metal receiver, no gas system, and design allowing correct head space with loose tolerances.Low cost is in their history. The MP5 is a shortened G3, which is a refined CETME Model 58, which was designed by former Mauser engineers led by Ludwig Vorgrimler based on the CEAM Model 1950, which was based on the Mauser StG 45(M), which was cost reduced from the StG 44 when Germany was losing WWII, which was designed to use fewer strategic resources like steel.The product line around the MP5 is a brilliant exercise in delivering many SKUs at low cost due to common parts and tooling, allowing good economics for companies making a range of models including MKE, POF, and PTR Industries.The 9x19mm MP5K machine pistol to 7.62x51mm HK21 belt fed GPMG receivers share the same profile and bending jigs, varying primarily in length. The belt fed guns eschew a traditional top mounted feed tray, hanging the mechanism beneath their receiver to share nearly half their parts with their rifle siblings.The bolt carrier groups have only minor differences beyond length, weight, and bolt shape/face diameter for the corresponding cartridge - a different Steuerstück “steering piece” determining the recoil force split between bolt carrier and receiver, bolt latch for rifle calibers, tungsten granules for anti-bounce in pistol calibers, enhanced extractor for the HK21/MSG90/PSG1 , and half-moon rollers for the MSG90/PSG1.Apart from the G3SG/1, MSG90, and PSG1 they share the same fire control groups with the HK21 trigger box having a little more ejector clearance.Handguards come in one of three lengths except for the HK21, MP5K, MSG90, and PSG1. Short for MP5/HK53, medium for HK32/HK33/G3K, and long for the G3.They share the same grip frames cut to one of three lengths.They shared the same stocks with different buffers and the end cap having one or two pins apart from the HK21 until a cost reduced all-in-one plastic unit was made for the MP5 and HK33. The G3SG/1, MSG90, and PSG1 just added cheek risers and adjustable butt plate.The diopter rear sights and front triple frames have minor differences.Cocking tubes just get different length ribbed sections.The semiautomatic HK41, HK43, HK91, HK93, and HK94 are identical to the corresponding select fire guns apart from a receiver denial shelf where the auto sear would be. corresponding adjustment to the trigger box + grip frame, and barrels at least 16″ long.People interested in the related firearms history should read Full Circle - A Treatise on Roller Locking. Unfortunately, it’s out of print and very collectible like discontinued HK products.SAS commando introducing the MP5 to the world in London England, 1980. All the cool kids (SEAL, SWAT, etc.) wanted one after that.Bruce Willis in Die Hard circa 1988. That’s an HK94 with its barrel shortened, but most people don’t notice the missing 3-lug suppressor mount, absent magazine release flapper, and shelved semiautomatic receiver. Predator the previous year also featured modified HK94s.Palmetto State Armory MP5 as presented at Shot Show 2019. It’s a “reverse stretch” (MP5K front, MP5 rear to allow telescoping stock use) with Magpul grip, hand guard, and selector. From SHOT Show: Palmetto State Armory MP5 Update - The Truth About Guns:Top view of MP5 barrel trunnion 7, bolt head 4, rollers 5a + 5b, steering piece 2, and bolt carrier 1 from US Patent 3283435. The angles of trunnion recesses 7a + 7b and steering piece nose 3 determine the bolt thrust distribution ratio between trunnion and bolt carrier. They also set the distance multiple the carrier moves versus the bolt head until the rollers retract to clear the recesses.While this is more expensive to produce than pure blowback, the fraction of recoil energy going into the bolt carrier and mechanical disadvantage allow a much lower reciprocating mass to delay opening until chamber pressure has dropped to a safe level. Less moving mass hitting the back of the gun means lower movement for faster accurate fire.1997 HK USA military and law enforcement catalog. 9x19mm MP5K second row left. 9x19mm MP5 receiver in the center. 5.56x45mm HK33K bottom left. 7.62x51mm belt fed HK21E bottom right. Note the commonalities, especially the trigger packs (in the detached grip frames) usable with all four guns.That trigger box interchangeability is why Heckler and Koch roller delayed blow back designs are very attractive in the 38 of 50 states where select fire weapons are legal. Prices have skyrocketed with increasing demand since the supply of transferable machine guns was frozen on May 19th, 1986 with each grandfathered example selling for $8,000 - $25,000 or more. $30,000 for one registered HK auto sear is a good value, allowing you to enjoy shooting a wide range of guns automatically using relatively affordable semiautomatic hosts.S&H Manufacturing sear worth far more than its weight in gold. Photo from DND guns.