On 11/07/2020 08:38, Chris Hogg wrote:
On Sat, 11 Jul 2020 08:24:53 +0100, "Brian Gaff \(Sofa\)"
wrote:

Well, often the carrying of weapons impacts on weight and drag and that
impacts on endurance or in the air time. As for convergence, often they did
not bother about that from what I was told, since the basic need was to
disable the craft they were firing at and as long as all the bullets went
in somewhere you get a lot more chance of hitting something vital.
I believe Hurricanes had a better range than Spitfires, but spitfires were
faster and more agile.
Brian

My understanding is that although the Spitfire is what people first
think about for UK WW2 fighter aircraft, in fact the Hurricane was
responsible for more 'kills'.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-new...e-plane-247944

There were several reasons for that:

First, there were more Hurricanes than Spitfires; 33 Squadrons as
against 18.

Second, turnaround time, the time taken to re-arm and re-fuel, for a
Spitfire was 26 minutes as compared to nine minutes for a Hurricane, so
they spent less time on the ground.

Third, as mentioned in that article, the simpler design of the Hurricane
made it easy to repair at the airfield, while the Spitfire often had to
be sent away for specialist repairs. As a result, on average 2 out of
every three Hurricanes on strength were available for action at any one
time, as compared to one in three Spitfires.

Fourth, it was policy to deploy Hurricanes against the bomber
formations, while the Spitfires took on the more difficult escort fighters.

--
Colin Bignell