ok, that being settled (thanks by the way,) i have a new set of questions, if the TS will let me hog for a while. i felt that the key to defensive air power rested on destruction of enemy bombers (both in flight and their facilities on the ground.) this, assuming i was an axis power faced with the reality of a long, drawn out war with say, the US or russia.

with that, one could have narrowed the performance requirement for pursuit planes. the all-around requirements were:

level speed
dive
climb
maneuverability
ceiling
range
firepower

i arranged the above qualities, the first four being largely defensive features in a fighter, the bottom three being largely offensive. maneuverability i believe, is a purely defensive feature and hardly helps one in shooting someone down (though you can keep him from shooting you down.)

so a pursuit plane with enough ceiling and offensive punch to chase bombers and shoot them from the sky, i believe, should have been the focus of development. the fighter simply had to have enough level and dive speed to run away from enemy fighters.

the story of the raiden fighter was a sad one in that it basically followed what i wrote. it had great success in attacking b-29s because of its speed, armor, and four cannon. but it fared badly when the p-51 were sent to escort the fortresses. it had enough level speed to stay apace with the mustang in several. but it couldn't turn or dive away when the american fighter got on its tail. but even then the main reason for the failure was inferior numbers and low pilot quality by the time the shooting over japanese airspace happened. there were japanese pilots who actually managed to down mustangs using the raiden (most notable was this guy akamatsu who shot down 15 p-51s.) but those guys were exceptional. heavily armed and armored fighters like the shiden and raiden were more difficult to fly (and so it took longer training.) veterans used to the zero complained those two planes flew like trucks and the feature they appreciated most was the added armor protection.