Didn’t we have a twin engine night fighter that looked kind of like this?
Black Widow?
“Didn’t we have a twin engine night fighter that looked kind of like this?
Black Widow?” [blueunicorn6, post 21]
Northrop built the P-61 Black Widow for USAAF. Similar in configuration to Lockheed’s P-38, it had a central pod fuselage and twin booms to the outside, each mounting an R-2800 two-row radial engine turning out 2000 hp.
The P-61 was the first US warplane built expressly for night fighting, and the first designed to mount radar. It was armed with four 20mm cannon under the crew stations, fixed to fire forward, and four 50-cal machine guns in a turret atop the fuselage. The latter could traverse full-circle in azimuth and be elevated to 90 degrees, thus enabling attack from behind and below termed “zero deflection.” In actual operation, it proved unsuitable for a number of reasons and was often removed.
The reputation of Bolton Paul’s Defiant suffered because it wasn’t able to mix it up with single-seat fighters. In actual action it proved successful against bombers and other aircraft that also could not vie with single-seaters. And when airborne radar was installed, it enjoyed renewed success for a time.
But radar-equipped night fighters enjoyed only moderate successes until two-engine designs appeared. The extra power of two engines helped compensate for the additional weight of the second crewmember and the radar equipment.
Single-seat fighters were also handicapped even after radar was installed: night air combat is very different from day air combat, and operating the radar on top of all the pilot had to do already quickly led to task saturation. Despite their outsize egoes, fighter pilots were overworked at night and simply couldn’t cope.