Quote:
Originally Posted by CCIP
It did fine as a night fighter. Again, I think it's not really a case of bad design, more just a case of designing it for a situation that didn't exist in daytime fighting where it was used. The Defiant was designed with unescorted bombers in mind, so it wasn't a "fighter" in the dogfighting sense to begin with...
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my issue with the Defiant is not so much the turret as the fact that it had no forward firing guns, so could only engage bombers from its sides and was useless against fighters.
Almost every plane designed at that time, even light bombers like the SBD, VAL or IL-2 had forward firing guns.