History 
     As all serious World War II aircraft model builders know, the Focke-Wulf 190D (Dora) was built in response to the 1941 German Luftwaffe RLM Sofortprogramm (immediate program) for a high altitude fighter capable of confronting the four engined strategic bombers that the RLM knew were coming. Requirements included a top speed of 405mph at a minimum altitude of 39000 feet. The fighter had to be available as quickly as possible, and in order to do that, Kurt Tank and his fellow engineers at Focke-Wulf knew it had to be based on existing Fw-190A airframes. 

     After the failures of the trials of the Fw-190B and C, due to cockpit pressurization problems, Kurt pressed on with the third phase of his research for the Sofortprogramm in March 1942, designing an aircraft around a bomber engine, the Junkers Jumo 213.  It developed a power rating of 1700bhp (brake horsepower) and was an inverted V-12, like the Daimler-Benz series of inverted V-12s currently in use in the Bf-109.  The difference lay in available numbers of the Jumo engine vis a vis the Daimler-Benz. 

     The first prototype of the Dora, V17, flew for the first time in September of 1942.  Following prototype testing proved encouraging, and the production run was started in the spring of 1944.  The fighter proved successful, and it was a thorn in the side of the Allied fighter squadrons of the European Theatre who engaged it in combat, but along with Tank's opus magnus, the Ta-152 (Daimler-Benz powered), and Willy Messerschmitt's Me-262 jet fighter, by late 1944, it was too little, too late to stem the flow of overwhelming Allied numbers of aircraft.