Il-2-37 Light Bomber is a Soviet Air unit in Steel Division II.
Background[ | ]
The ultimate incarnation of the armored ground attack plane idea born in the 1930s in the Soviet Union, the Il-2 was designed by Sergey Ilyushin in 1938. Designed from the ground up as an armored assault aircraft, the plane was designed with an armored shell weighing in excess of 700 kg, protecting the crew, engine, radiatiors, and the fuel tank. To save weight, the armor doubled as a loadbearing structure.
The Il-2's design, as a single-engine propeller-driven monoplane with heavy armor and heavy armament prevailed against competing designs from Sukhoi and was pressed into production after being upgraded with a more powerful powerful plant, the Mikulin AM-38, and finally passing trials in April 1941. Its firepower, resilience, and reasonable price tag made it a vital part of the Soviet war effort - so much that Stalin described the Il-2 as being as important to the Red Army as air or bread.
It remained in production until 1945, with 36 183 units produced, and the last units were retired as late as 1954 by Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. Together with its successor, the Il-10, it became the most produced military aircraft in history.
The Il-2-37 was a variant of the Il-2M outfitted with two Nudelman-Suranov NS-37 37mm autocannons in conformal gun pods under the wings, similar to the Junkers Ju 87 Kanonenvogel variants. However, the performance was far cry from that of the German dive bomber, and the reduced bomb load (a third of the regular Il-2's 600kg capacity) resulted in the variant being cancelled after just 3 500 units were produced. The PTAB-armed Il-2s became the main anti-tank weapon on the front. Apart from the NS-37, also used on the LaGG-3 and Yak-9T fighters, it also carried the ShKAS 7.62mm machine gun and the turret-mounted Berezin UB (УБ - Универсальный Березина, Berezin's Universal).