From a distance the Il-10 looked like a tidier Il-2, and it did the same job — but almost everything was new. The airframe was all-metal and aerodynamically refined, where early Il-2s used a wooden rear fuselage. The wing was smaller and cleaner, the undercarriage retracted more neatly, and the cooling radiators were moved inside the armoured hull rather than hanging in the airflow. Combined with the ~2,000 hp AM-42, that cut drag and lifted top speed from roughly 410 km/h to about 550 km/h.

Protection stayed comparable — the armoured “bathtub” shielding engine, pilot and gunner — and the rear defensive gun was upgraded to a hard-hitting 20 mm cannon. The price was complexity: the Il-10 was harder to build and its new engine needed sorting out. It also arrived so late that the Il-2 fought the vast majority of the war. But as a design, the Il-10 was the Sturmovik idea brought to full maturity.

The AM-42 was a development of the Mikulin V-12 family, tuned for low-altitude ground-attack work and rated at roughly 2,000 hp for takeoff (sources also quote a lower nominal figure of around 1,770 hp, reflecting continuous rather than takeoff power). Feeding a big engine inside an armoured hull created real cooling and reliability headaches: early Il-10s suffered engine failures, and a good part of the type’s first year in service was spent making the AM-42 dependable. Once sorted, it gave the Sturmovik the speed it had always wanted — the single biggest reason the Il-10 outperformed the Il-2 it replaced.

Forward firepower came from wing-mounted 23 mm cannon — the VYa-23 on early aircraft, later the NS-23, with some blocks carrying four — backed by machine guns, RS-82 and RS-132 rockets, and a bomb load commonly cited at up to about 500–600 kg. The most meaningful change from the Il-2 was at the back: the rear crewman operated an Il-KU-8 mounting with a 20 mm cannon (a 12.7 mm machine gun on some aircraft), where the Il-2’s gunner had only a rifle-calibre weapon and almost no protection. German pilots had learned to attack the Il-2 from dead astern; the Il-10 made that a much more dangerous thing to try. Exact armament fits varied by production block and year — treat any single loadout as one of several.

The Il-10 was a Soviet state product built in the 1940s and 50s, never traded on an open market, so no credible flyaway unit price or cost-per-flight-hour figure exists in the public record — and none should be invented. Production was measured in factory output and state plans, not dollars. What we can say is that it was designed to be affordable in quantity: like the Il-2 before it, the Il-10 was meant to be built and expended in enormous numbers, which is exactly what happened — roughly six thousand were produced across the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. Any precise cost figure attached to the type today is an estimate at best.