Recent content by Iskandar Taib

Yalta? Some Russians, maybe?

Maybe SOME would, but if one had to fight a war in something one knew was absolutely obsolete and one didn't have much of a chance of surviving, let alone getting to one's target, some might feel differently than you do. As I said, there are some who were pretty vocal about what they thought...

Hmm.. You might be right. I could've sworn there was a Mark XX pictured in Quill's book, but I'll have to go get it out of storage. The Spitfire Society's web page shows no such Mark.

The Spit XIV started out as a Spit VIII. The Spit VIII was a Spit V with a two stage Merlin, some added tankage, tropicalized, a retractable tail wheel, and couple other refinements. The IX was basically a Mark V with a two stage Merlin in the nose, and was supposed to be a stop-gap measure. It...

The Spitfire radiator was indeed designed to take advantage of the Meredith effect. See Quill's book. The Meredith effect was discovered in 1935, at the RAE, and Supermarine must have known about it. Just because the Mustang did it better does not mean others didn't use it. Yes, they can...

The Mustang has it on range, and roll rate. It also has better ground handling (wide gear) and the ability to carry stores outboard of the landing gear (a Spitfire would tip over or stress the wing). Other than that the XIV comes out ahead. I wonder how the range of the XVIII (essentially a...

Yeah, a lot of people are fond of talking about radiator drag, but one has to remember that the inlet for cooling air for the radial engine produces at least as much drag, maybe even more. The Spitfire used the Meredith effect to recover some of the energy lost to the drag. and I don't see any...

The thing though is.. why decrease RPM at all? If you want to use the paddle blader (and have the ground clearance) at a lower RPM, just use a lower gear ratio on the reduction gear. The torque below operating RPM doesn't matter, since you don't need to run below operating RPM anyway.

No one's mentioned the Stormovik yet?

Not always true. Those who flew Brewster Buffalos and P-39s in the Pacific weren't shy about saying what they thought of those planes, and their capabilities against their adversaries. This might've been true for the BoB, but in 1941 and later the Brits were the ones who had to fly over...

750 to 1025 HP is fairly significant. Yup! But those were just the rods, and the rods were from a late model Allison. And Allisons aren't used in racing - if the basic engine was good enough, you could hop it up like they hop up the Merlins. This makes for VERY interesting reading...

What I'm getting at is that you can't turn off the second blower stage. What you CAN do is change the gears so that the two stages run faster (at high altitude) or slower (at low altitude). The blower absorbs a lot of power that can otherwise go to the prop. At low altitudes, you use the low...

Thanks! I spent a lot of time looking, didn't find much. Where is info like this published? I did come across a big web site that had a lot of info about Torch - they mentioned Seafire vs. Dewoitine encounters, but nothing about the F4Fs.

From what I understand, you never get as much thrust out of the Meredith Effect as it takes to overcome the drag of the radiator inlet. You can recover quite a bit, but it is never zero sum or better. In any case, there is only so much thrust that can be generated out of the heat produced by the...

Wait a sec.. wasn't the 108 a GA aircraft?? Also, where does the turning radius and low speed handling information come from? The 109 had a higher wing loading than the Spitfire and just about everything I've read says the Spitfire could outturn the 109. The Spitfire was also supposedly...