BONUS CONTENT!

The Development of the F4U Corsair!

Last week, I released a massive documentary on the entire service life of the F4U Corsair! It was a huge undertaking, but the finished production tells the entire story of this beautiful and doubted warbird. Now, I'll show you the research that went into that video for this newsletter! In case you missed it, you can watch it here:

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BEHIND THE SCENES:

To start with, let's take a look at some of the developmental communications and documents surrounding the birth of the F4U! First off, I found it very interesting just how heavily the Navy's design competition leaned into the "Speed is everything" approach - they were truly looking for the fastest aircraft - nothing else mattered in their minds. Here is one of the pages from the competition request that states this very clearly (Point b). But of course, they do state that they will consider overall performance and other parameters - but speed would drive everything.

Continuing the development points, I found this page very interesting in my research - and would have normally shown it further in the video. However, I decided that most people might not find it as fascinating as I did! But you can be the judge.

Attached here is the scoring of the prototypes in the Navy's competition. "Vought B" is the F4U Corsair - while Vought A is another gull-wing design that did not see production as far as I know. Vought B's final score in the competition would be 86.4 - a clear winner based on the weight of the categories. Some designs failed to break 60 points. Of note, however, is Brewster Design B's second-place finish, with 81.4 points! This performance nearly eliminated the Corsair from the competition.

Next, I would like to point your attention to the prototype itself! This is the first model of the Corsair - labeled the XF4U. In this early design, we can see a few notable features that were mentioned in the video, but I will add detail on them here.

First off, we can see the location of the cockpit - it is much farther up along the nose than you might remember. In addition, the nose is quite a bit shorter than the actual Corsair. Both of these are because of an armament change that was issued to the XF4U. Reports had recently come in from Britain making it clear that .30 caliber machine guns were no longer sufficient for a frontline fighter. So - the XF4U would need reworking with a heavier punch.

This design would move the .30s from the nose, replacing them with fuel tanks, and put more .50s in the wings. This change succeeded in the armament reworking but required the cockpit to be moved back and the nose extended in order to make room for the revisions - these would come together to create the "Hose Nose".

In addition, is one feature on this prototype that was actually inaccurate in my simulations from the documentary - can you guess what it is?

The canopy! In our flight simulator, there is actually no "birdcage" model of the Corsair - as it was used for just a short period of time, being replaced early on with a bubble canopy for better visibility.

The XF4U indeed had this model - but in our documentary, we had to work with what we had - and used the traditional model of the Corsair's canopy. If you caught this slight error - good for you! Gold star.

(100 TJ3 Gold Stars may be redeemed for one high five from TJ at any public appearance event in the future.)

Well - this is all I have for today on the development of the F4U! Hopefully you guys enjoyed a little bit of behind-the-scenes info on my Corsair video. Now - I will leave you guys a little sneak peek of an upcoming documentary I have in the works! Let's see if you guys can guess what the topic might be!

While I continue to search for more stories to tell, your support on Patreon would be greatly appreciated!

Lately, more and more AI "history" channels have been popping up on YouTube (including some that have even stolen my content). This unfortunately means that it is more important than ever to have supporters to help fund my work here. Plus, get all sorts of behind-the-scenes content! You can join here: TJ3 History Patreon!​

A sincere thank you to those of you who already support me there. You guy mean the world to me.

Thanks again for reading and I will talk to you guys soon!

Please reply with your thoughts or feedback here! Here's to saving more history together.

-TJ

TJ3Business@gmail.com
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