Talk:Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-3/Archive 1

Archive 1

Alexander 'Sasha' Pokryshkin

Even with the MiG-3's limitations, Alexander 'Sasha' Pokryshkin, the second leading Soviet ace of the war with 59 official victories, recorded most of those victories while flying a MiG-3.

I had the idea that Sasha shot down approx 1/3 of its victories with the MiG-3 and the rest with the P-39. Can anyone check this?

Updating the information. Added a bunch more about hte development. --Evil.Merlin 01:39, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

I applaud your ambitious editing, but I have three suggestions. First, you need to offer readers something by which they can understand what the "OKO of zavod No. 1" was. Second, the para. introduced with "These changes included: ..." needs to be better worked out. It would seem to be better rendered as a bulleted list (but some folks object to long lists, especially so close to the start of the article). Third, please add citations for your new material (and for older material which may apply). It's next to impossible for later editors to figure out where it came from and add citations later. The lack of footnotes and references makes it difficult for these articles to be rated higher. Good editing! Askari Mark | Talk 04:33, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

Working on it. I've added the Russian and English translations for the various groups involved in the MiG-3's life. I've also cleaned up some of the sections. One other note, when it comes to the guns, the center mounted weapon was/is the Universal'ny Berezina Synkhronny (Universal Berezin Syncronized) or UBS, the UBK is Kryl'evoj, meaning wing mounted. --Evil.Merlin 06:25, 21 November 2006 (UTC)

From the article on Pokryshkin itself: "Pokryshkin started the war flying the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-3 fighter, in which he scored almost twenty victories. In August of 1942 his regiment, now renamed 16th Guards Fighter Regiment, converted to lend-lease Bell P-39 Airacobras, which despite a persistent myth the Soviets have never used in the ground attack role. Soviet pilots liked this aircraft, and found it quite competitive with the Messerschmitt Bf-109 and superior to the Focke-Wulf FW-190 at the low air combat attitudes common on the Eastern Front. Pokryshkin really enjoyed the 37mm cannon's destructive firepower, and had his own aircraft rigged so that the single button simultaneously fired both the main cannon and the 2 upper nose-mounted .50 caliber machine guns, synchronized to fire through the propellor (airscrew), in addition to the pair of .30 caliber machine guns mounted in each wing, outside the propellor arc and therefore unsynchronized. In his memoirs he describes any enemy aircraft immediately disintegrating upon being hit by the salvo. Pokryshkin and his regiment were repeatedly asked to convert to new Soviet fighters such as the La-5 and Alexander Sergeyevich Yakovlev's Yak fighter series. However Pokryshkin found La-5's firepower insufficient and personally disliked Yakovlev so he never did. Finally, in 1944, he found an aircraft that he was willing to convert to: the Lavochkin La-7. Unfortunately one of his close friends, Soviet 50-kill (31 personal and 19 group) ace Alexander Klubov was killed in a landing mishap while converting to the La-7. The crash was blamed on the malfunction of the plane's hydraulic system. Pokryshkin subsequently cancelled his regiment's conversion, and there are multiple reports that they instead began flying Bell P-63 Kingcobras. By the lend-lease agreement with United States, the Soviet Union was not allowed to use P-63s against Germany; they were given only to be used in the eventual battle with Japan. Thus it is quite understandable that no mention of this appears in any official records. However, personal accounts of German pilots and flak crewmen who encountered P-63s in the skies of Eastern Prussia as well as the memoirs of one of the pilots in Pokryshkin's squadron appear to confirm that fact."Dirk P Broer (talk) 02:27, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

Intro too long

The introduction to this article is too long. I think it could do with more sections and restructure the whole article. --Francisco Valverde 16:58, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

• Working on it. Lets start with this and see what people think. I also managed to finish translating the pilots manual for the MiG-3 as well as some other Russian documentation from the early 40's. I will do my best to get it into the article if it is pertinant. I will also remember to add my references. Sorry about that. --Evil.Merlin 02:11, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

Revv-erted

What is the problem with Youtube video links here? 82.131.210.162 19:57, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

Youtube videos are usually copyrighted material belonging to someone else. If the owner of the video uploads it to WikiCommons and releases it to the public then it's welcome. Binksternet 21:22, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

But we are not taking it and using it! We are just hyperlink pointing to it, so anybody interested can go to the particulat subpage of Youtube and watch it THERE, NOT here! Youtube owners get all the visitor traffic and associated advertisement revenue so including the link here actually benefits them there. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.131.210.162 (talk) 20:04, 7 September 2007 (UTC)

Romainian Usage

Much like "hacks" in the US Army Air corps had some Storches and Bf 108's (and in some cases even Fw 190's), the Romanian MiG-3, as flown by Cpt 'Bazu' Cantacuzino, was never used in combat. It was a single captured aircraft used PERHAPS for some aggressor training. Thus it does not belong on the Flown By list.

--Evil.Merlin (talk) 16:49, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

MiG-7

Why does MiG-7 redirect here? —Preceding unsigned comment added by DFRussia (talk • contribs) 07:10, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

You might want to check the section 'Variants'Dirk P Broer (talk) 02:37, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Tag & Assess 2008

Article reassessed and graded as start class. --dashiellx (talk) 16:57, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

Stalin State Prize

Why are we putting the USSR State Prize in the lead section when it is not present in the article body? Furthermore, the reference may say that the aircraft garnered Gurevich his prize, but I question its saying the prize stemmed from the problematic MiG-3. The reference is already wrong in saying that Mikoyan won the prize in 1941, so it appears that the reference is flawed. Binksternet (talk) 00:04, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

The reference is in the "bible" of Angelucci and Matricardi... probably they make mistakes sometimes... fortunately there are true "expertens" in en wiki to detect them... Why we write in the lead that the designer(s) won the Stalin prize? Probably because is an interesting new, to me more appropriate in the lead of the references to the factories that produced the types, this really out of place - in no other article I found anithing like that - and why we put it in the lead and not in the rest of the "body"? May be in this way we dont say the same thing in the space of less than a page... but it is my opinion... and I learnt that here only the opinions of the leader contributors mean something... so sad! --Gian piero milanetti (talk) 20:29, 21 June 2010 (UTC)

Sad that "the opinions of the leader contributors mean something"? What are you trying to say? Your English is not clear, which is why you have two or three editors from Wikipedia:WikiProject Aviation chasing you around en.wiki warplane articles trying to fix the problems you introduce with the majority of your contributions. Besides English problems, you have trouble maintaining a sense of the big picture in some of your slapdash additions to articles. Whew! I am glad your recent Italian book was not written in English, or your copy editor would have had quite a lot of extra work.

As far as mention of the prize in the lead section, you say you found no other article with news such as this... Perhaps that is itself a message of how inappropriate it is. Throughout the war, Soviet aircraft designers received a string of Stalin Prizes; each one is notable, but not so huge like the Nobel Prize. From 1941 to 1946, all of these aeronautical engineers took multiple Stalin Prizes, while Gurevich won one and Mikoyan won nothing: Sergey Ilyushin (4), Semyon Lavochkin (3), Nikolai Polikarpov (2), Alexander Sergeyevich Yakovlev (3). It was in 1947, 1948 and 1949 that Mikoyan and Gurevich began to catch up to their colleagues—but certainly not for the mediocre MiG-3. Binksternet (talk) 06:28, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Slapdash? You make me laugh, "spassiba"... good way to start the day... I didnt know that word... I am sorry to keep You busy... that's way lately I am trying to use only English-written books... I would prefere not to write in English that is not such a beautiful language, but if I started to contribute in en wiki it was because I was so startled and saddened and disappointed to see how poorly and badly Italian aircraft (not only Italian, to say the truth, but even Japanese, German, Rumenian and Soviet, in a word: NOT AMERICAN7ENGLISH) were treated in en wiki pages. You know what I mean: no words about how good they were - if they were - and many sentences to say how bad they were confronted with Allied equipment (the Pages about the Spitfire and the Mustang speake for themselves... we had to wait for the Soviet books to read how clumsy and ineffective and troublesome were - for instance - the first variants of the legendary Spitfire!)... on the contrary I was amazed to see how similar in adverts were many parts of articles about American/English equipments... I still find many obstacles when I try to add some references about defects of Allied planes, while there is no problem if you write how superlative they were... I see that 70 years are not enough for somebody to accept the truth...

Regards from Roma and thanks for the information about the Stalin prizes, I didn't know about it... --Gian piero milanetti (talk) 07:22, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Interceptor

This article fails to take into account that the MiG-3 was designed as an interceptor, explaining the high power-to-weight ratio and low manoeuvreabality at low speed. The article seems to assume that the plane is a standard air-superiority fighter and criticizes its performance based on that. Someone reading this article without extensive knowledge about the subject will only understand from the article that the MiG-3 was meant to compete with Bf-109's and failed. Proposed changes: 1) Classify the aircraft as an "Interceptor" instead of "Fighter" 2) Mention explicitly that the plane was designed as an interceptor and features typical interceptor performance: high ceiling, high cruise speed and low manoevreability. 3) Remove the "Comparison with other fighters" section. It's completely apples vs. oranges. This plane was not meant to fulfil the same roles as the Bf109, La-3, etc. --Tervan (talk) 14:03, 30 August 2012 (UTC)

Why praise a design that did not suit the problem at hand? Why tell the reader the aircraft might have been superb against an enemy that never appeared: heavy bombers? Even then, its light weaponry was insufficient to quickly take down a bomber. Binksternet (talk) 15:02, 30 August 2012 (UTC)

The Bf 109 and the Spitfire were also designed as interceptors, but were far more versatile than the MiG. But then, neither of them had the very heavy, but powerful, AM-35. I would argue that poor maneuverability is not an inherent characteristic of interceptor like you seem to think, although it certainly less important than the all-important time to climb number. To which fuel capacity was often sacrificed in order to save weight; something that the Bf 109 and Spitfire struggled with their entire careers as they changed roles.--Sturmvogel 66 (talk) 16:47, 30 August 2012 (UTC)

@Binkersternet: I'm not suggesting the article should praise, after all, this is an encyclopaedia so there should only be facts. What I'm arguing is that the article does the opposite, it describes the MiG-3 (same for the MiG-1 article) as if they were fighters. Try to read this article from a layman's perspective, what I would remember is: The MiG-3 was a WWII fighter that failed to perform it's role. While in fact "The MiG-3 was a WWII interceptor that saw also use in other roles" would be more accurate. Sure, it's a good thing to keep the criticism of the design, but it's needed in a context.

@Sturmvogel 66: Inherent is a strong word, usually it's a direct result of interceptors being designed for speed and high-altitude performance. The Bf 109 was considerably less manoevreable than contemporary fighters (like the Hurricane).^ref Both the Bf 109 and the Spitfire were arguably less dedicated interceptors than the MiG-3, having received more attention to dogfighting, yet on their page it is stated clearly that they were conceived as interceptor while here it is completely ignored.

This is why I would like to revise the page from a standpoint that it is an interceptor and mention the problems and defects the design faced in their respective context. (in interceptor role: stalls at high altitude, in air superiority role: low manoeuvrability and weak armament, in fighter-bomber role: high stall speed) --Tervan (talk) 09:38, 31 August 2012 (UTC)