The good news is that losing intercooler or turbo would just be a fractional performance reduction, not a countdown to an engine loss that an oil cooler hit wou

The good news is that losing intercooler or turbo would just be a fractional performance reduction, not a countdown to an engine loss that an oil cooler hit would be. This ties in with a question I was asking myself after seeing this impressive setup: did anyone build a skin surface intercooler? I seem to remember reading about at least one plane that had its oil cooler in the skin early in development until they accepted that the added vulnerability was worse than the drag from a conventional box radiator and abandoned the idea. But with the intercooler the tradeoffs might be very different. You could even add a bypass mechanism for when the skin/cooler has become so leaky that the engine has effectively become naturally aspirated and turbo without intercooler would be an improvement.