There's also the fact that in the long-range combat of the Pacific War, a leaking fuel tank could be almost as deadly as a completely destroyed plane. At those extreme ranges, just a couple of .50-caliber holes poked in a fuel tank could mean the difference between getting home and ditching in the sea.

Awesome. This helps explain why the U.S. stuck with the AM/M2 over the 20 mm for so long. I knew the Japanese did eventually introduce self-sealing tanks, but didn't know they were so ineffective.

I remember watching on the History channel where The American Pacific pilots said they would aim just behind the pilot and shoot rupturing a fuel tank. But by the diagrams you showed us those weren't fuel tanks they were rupturing those were oxygen tanks.

Your million dollar plane and pilot is a flying bomb. Can you imagine sitting in a cardboard box surrounded by fuel drums and being shot at ??

Light construction, no armour, no self sealing fuel tanks. Easy!

There are some ellements you have overlooked here. The Zero was a 1940 design. Its contemporaries, the Spitfire, Hurricane, ME109 etc also entered service without self sealing suel cells or armoured glass . Japenese industry was also increasingly starved of raw materials from 1943 onwards as their merchant shipping was sunk in ever greater numbers by allied submarines. What rubber was imported was directed primarily into things like tyre production.

A lot of perspective provided here. An excellent presentation.

Interesting 🧐

One factor trending to large numbers of plane models adopted was the low level of wartime labor skill. This lead to widespread use of single purpose jigs. Once you had a complete set of jigs made at great expense, you couldn't easily change designs nor expand production. If you needed a new set of tooling, might as well try to make a better plane.

One of the best feelings in War Thunder is setting a Zero, Kate or Val on fire - they can't put the fire out and they can't dive fast enough to blow it out. Nighty night, Tojo !

As always, very good research and presentation!

Really love your channel brother. You do such a great job delivering this rare, painstaking research in such a smooth and comprehensive way that the layman can become quite the WW2 bomber expert 🤓

Liberating destructively, that's a very military way of phrasing it. Thanks for the content.

My grandfather had a boatload of kids and got a pass on going to war.😂 Anyway, he worked at one of the aircraft plants in Southern California, working on self sealing tanks.

Excellent presentation

Wonderfully narrated and well documented.

As my uncle, who was an U.S. Army Air Force pilot during WW2, used to tell me when I was a small boy who was fascinated by everything and anything my father and two uncles would share with me about there experiences; after the Battle of the Bismarck Sea, word got around to everyone that the “jap” pilots (his terminology) were machine gunning any parachuting allied aircrew and any allied personnel floating in the water awaiting rescue.

This channel is awesum so much knowledge

That was very fine and well researched presentation. Speaks well of your work ethic and commitment to accuracy. Well done.

Great detail on the US tank design, as a point of comparison with the ineffective later war IJ design.