Recent content by b0ned0me

TBH its not rare for someone to decide they’ve spent enough of their energy on a forum/game/whatever and ask for their account to be zapped, avoiding the temptation of returning and wasting even more. Childish would have been deleteing all his previous posts first, which I have seen people do...

But on the other hand, the Hurricane started out with fabric covered wings that significantly hurt performance. A lot of the structure was built out steel tubes that to be cut to exact length, then ends pressed exactly square, then fitted into fairly complex little fastener/joiner gizmos and...

I thought that was a government owned B-29 plant with Bell acting as a hostilities-only management contractor, and Lockheed buying the mothballed factory from the DoD years after Bell got their Dear John from Uncle Sam. Or have I got my mammoth defense plants mixed up again? The US built so...

The G-R designs seem to have been not much better than what Armstrong-Whitworth were producing, the lack of a center bearing precluding anything more than modest power levels. As an incidental comment, I have seen a slightly more detailed comment regarding Pratt & Whitney licensing in the UK...

Hi. I'm looking at getting a few die cast/prebuilt and I was wondering if anyone could share some advice: which scale has best availability for semi-obscure aircraft from the late thirties/ww2 1:72 or 1:100? Bigger? smaller? recommendations/warnings regarding manufacturers/sellers? I'm not a...

But the Air Ministry did not just allocate contracts to build aircraft, it also provided the huge amounts of government authorizations required to obtain land, building materials, workers, machine tools, electricity, gas, petrol, oils, paint, aluminum, fabric, coal for heating, beans for the...

For the Tiger, wasn't it more that it needed more bearings rather than better bearings? As far as I know it just had no center bearing, just like the GR-14K and many other early two-row engines that started disintegrating when asked for more than 1000hp. So more bulk to fit the extra bearing...

Without getting dragged into the details of which mark is best when, I don’t think this is quite how the process worked during WW2. When the government decided it needed a certain firm to build a certain number of a certain type of aircraft, it also necessarily decided how many workers it was...

Mmmm, Ark Royals defending the I/PTO from operating bases in presumably Trincomalee & Fremantle? Sounds like fun. Might be an idea to make those ships a bit larger (and more expensive, and fewer) to get better range. Would presumably also need a fair few of those millions diverted into building...

Thanks for the comment, that is very good to know. My strong suspicion is that if there was any ‘serious’ interest it would have left such traces in the archives that you would have come across it multiple times already. If it’s so obscure as to not have shown up in your research or to warrant a...

I had to run the page through google translate, schoolboy French from 30 years ago was not up to it. But yes, anything after probably 1937 is too late to help. It’s very interesting to understand the differences and similarities between the industries, expansion plans etc and the direction...

Yes, the first article I linked to goes into the Fordair project in a bit more detail than I have seen elsewhere. Apparently it covered the Griffon as well!

Thank you both, much appreciated! I somehow missed the 9V mention although it’s fairly obvious now it’s pointed out. . I see what you mean about it being a failure. Seriously, only 710hp takeoff from the workhorse Cyclone?? That is astonishing. So of the four foreign candidates Bristol, P&W...

Thank you. That is interesting because if the French were also talking to Wright then they were pursuing all four volume producer of high performance engines in the western world. G-R and Hispano clearly weren’t keeping their customer happy!

I have seen a few references over the years to alleged attempts by UK firms to interest the Air Ministry in licensed P&W or Wright engines but never any detail, and with names seemingly picked at random. Has anyone ever come across any plausible information on this topic, or are these nonsense...