"A Visit to Spartacon 2022" Topic

Last month I paid a visit to Spartacon just outside Lansing Michigan, it was great to see the local convention scene coming back to life. More pictures here link

Cool con. Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for the pictures, Anton. I'm happy conventions and other gatherings are starting to happen again. Personally, I'm looking forward to the local convention (Genghis Con, in Denver) at the end of the month.

Your caption got me to wondering about aircraft design. For much of my lifetime, American aircraft have been designed to fight Russian aircraft, and vice versa. Presumably, Soviet aircraft in the 1930s were designed and built to fight contemporary European aircraft, not the Japanese. Who did the Japanese have in mind as adversaries when they designed their aircraft? Of course, you could ask a similar question about pretty much any nation's aircraft.

Grelber

To my knowledge the Japanese considered the US to be their most significant opponent, with the British a close second. They did have the advantage of fighting the Chinese who bought an array of fighter aircraft from all over the world during the Sino-Japanese War.

The fighter jocks still resisted the switch from biplanes (KI-10) to monoplanes (KI-27 and A5M)but the monoplanes won out. The gigantic distances involved in naval operation (and fighting over China) impacted Japanese design forcing them to leave out heavy luxuries such as armor and self-sealing fuel tanks.

The more modern Russian aircraft (with cannons, armor and retractable landing gear) came as a shock to them and they rapidly pushed forward with heavier armament and better designs ending up with the Zero which was a far better aircraft but still suffered from weak engines and lack of protection.