Finally I had time to add few more sources and revise the text. One of the sources even mentions fuel tank extinguishers was used by some Ki-21, Ki-48 and Ki-49 bombers. All three types remained in production to 1944.
It’s possible that their line of thinking was that since fuel would be consumed from the wing tanks first (which I don’t know if its the case), by the time they engaged in combat those tanks would be empty and wouldn’t need self sealing protection.
CO2 extinguishers were there just in case you got jumped, and the fuselage tank still got you home.
That would have likely been the case on short range interception missions. J2M had most of it’s fuel in the fucelage tank after all. Some document even mention early J2Ms having removable wing tanks. Even so the decrease in fuel tank capacity is stated as the main reason. While production N1K2-J had self-sealing wing tanks, they still wrote down what the fuel capacity would be with plain unprotected metal tanks.
Interesting thing in devserver update log, though it’s only X-Ray. I can’t think of what else it could be than a strange way to implement CO₂ or nitrogen extinguishing system.
There are way more tanks than 5, but I’m quite sure they are merged into groups like this. Numbers 2, 3, 4, 5 should be all the wing tanks and the missing #1 would be the fuselage tanks.
Probably some minor buff to fire resistance. But it’s still based on luck, just lower chances presumably.
Was spading the Pe-3 which also has neutral gas pressurisation and I cought some .50cals from a P-39 that turned my fuel tank yellow but started a fire that burned down my plane.
oh wait there is information about Japanese fire extinguishers in US documents?!
I was wondering why they’ve not described it when Japan was number 1 in number of aircraft models which had it
I’d imagine there must be bit more somewhere, like what they thought about the system. For Americans it would have been difficult to find a working example to test, so any proper test report would have likely been from autumn 1945 at earliest.
That one is from TAIC summary #32 “Evolution of Zeke”. Might be worth it to check all the others which can be found. There are at least 41 in total, but for some reason very few are available online. TAIC Summary Reports Japanese Aircraft | Page 2 | Aircraft of World War II - WW2Aircraft.net Forums
Earlier I haven’t checked any, because I thought they had just the basics. At least armor is described a bit better in them.
