Armament comprised the potent combination of two 30-mm and two 20-mm cannon, all firing through the nose. Compared to its direct US equivalent, the F7F Tigercat which also failed to see meaningful service during the war*, the Ki-83 had the same range but was faster and more manoeuvrable. It is recorded to have been capable of executing a 2200 feet loop at 400 mph in 31 seconds. As well as recording the highest speed attained by any Japanese aircraft built during the war, the Ki-83 was blessed with remarkable agility for such a large aircraft and was fully aerobatic at high speeds. The result of an Imperial Army specification calling for a high altitude, long-range heavy fighter the aircraft that emerged from Mitsubishi’s experimental workshop was possibly the most aerodynamically clean radial engined aircraft ever built and possessed spectacular performance. As things turned out it became an obscure footnote in aviation history. Produced by a team under Tomio Kubo, who also designed the superlative Mitsubishi Ki-46, the Ki-83 could have been the finest twin-engined fighter of the war. Join us as we take a look at some other masterpieces of Japanese indigenous design, whether conceived when the Empire swept all before it, or suffering the crushing reality of total defeat. It should be noted that extreme racialism and racism was also institutional in Imperial Japan, where the official line often pushed was the notion of the Japanese as a supreme master race. This was followed by a weird scramble to find what American aeroplane the Zero was copied from (Spoiler alert: it wasn’t). This is particularly evident in the psychological effect the Mitsubishi Zero had on its foes in 1942, an effect only multiplied by the lens of racism through which the Japanese people were inevitably observed. This attitude was so ingrained in American thinking that a Western aircraft needed to be conjured up for any new Japanese type to be a copy of (try finding the aircraft that the Kyūshū J7W 震電, ‘ Shinden’ (Magnificent Lightning) was copied from: you will struggle). Whilst this was broadly true in the twenties, American Intelligence never noticed (or possibly cared) that the Japanese had attained parity with (and in some areas surpassed) the West by the latter half of the 1930s. In the lead up to, and during the Second World War it seems the US was all too willing to believe its own propaganda on Japanese industrial prowess, and although official intelligence material never descended to the level of the drivel quoted above (from ‘Mechanix Illustrated’) it did repeatedly assume that all Japanese aircraft were copies of Western types. They are able to turn out an exact copy of any mechanism that comes into their hands, but the type of mechanical imagination which went into its original creation-which, for want of a better term, is sometimes known as Yankee ingenuity-they are at a loss to duplicate.” “In the field of machinery the Japanese mind is at a peculiar disadvantage.
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