By: Archer - 31st March 2005 at 15:31
Good question. While that is the most prominent difference, they also added a firing position in the tail, added waist guns in the back and lost the bottom (retractable) turret. Keeping the turret in the rear fuselage would have concentrated the firing power on that end of the aircraft, so my guess is that it was part of a major redistribution of firing power around the airframe. Another reason could have been weight and balance. With the tail position you had added weight in the rear end, necessitating moving some weight forward to compensate.
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March 31, 2005 at 2:56 pm