Recent content by ohogain

Dry weight is the only weight that seems to be displayed for aircraft engines. Dows anyone know where one could find operating weights?

That's a given. The only high/parasol winged fighters with retractable gear that I know of had the gear retract into the fuselage.

During the interwar years (specifically, 1919-1930), the US, Italy and UK concentrated on biplanes for its fighters, while other countries, like France and Poland, either concentrated on monoplanes (Poland) or a mix of biplanes and monoplanes (France). I have a multi-part question. The...

That was my feel as well. Probably glide bombing was all it could realistically do, but I thought someone might know otherwise. According to Wikipedia, the initial complement of aircraft planned for the Graf Zeppelin was 10 × Messerschmitt Bf 109T fighters + 13 × Junkers Ju 87C or -E dive...

In "Biplanes, Triplanes and Seaplanes" by Michael Sharpe, it says that the Fiesler Fi 167, a two-seat torpedo bomber and reconnaissance aircraft, was built to German Air Ministry requirement for a multi-role carrier-borne warplane with the strength to make dive-bombing attacks at high speed. In...

On a chart referring to a SNCM (Lorraine) 130 Taurus is the following description: Avec réducteur et compresseur à grand diffuseur. Obviously, the engine is equipped with both reduction gearing and a supercharger, but what does "à grand diffuseur" mean? Is it turbocharged?

Here is v.1 from the Les moteurs a pistons aeronautiques francais (1900-1960), vol. 1/2 from #4 above. I cannot download v.2 for some reason.

An interesting site that I found: ModDesig lists most of the engines used by the USAAC/USAF up through 1949. It is an interesting read on how minor the change had to be to generate a new dash number, answering one of my questions as to why there were so many dash numbers extant. It is also...

When you look at the history of lightweight fighters across the board, British, French, German or American, not a single one could be called a success.

Very interesting. I would have thought that the 7.92mm would have performed better. It helps explain why so many air forces used the .303 in their aircraft. Do you know which .303 round was used for the tests?

Analyzing the Lorraine-Dietrich engines, they seem to be more powerful, in general, than contemporary Hispano-Suiza engines, but they are very poor on power to weight and power to capacity.

I ran across your post while researching Lorraine-Dietrich engines, as well. Since you posted almost a year ago, I hope you see this post. I found an article on the Lorraine-Dietrich aircraft engines at http://www.hydroretro.net/etudegh/moteursaviationlorraine.pdf It's in French, so you...

http://www.wwiiaircraftperformance.org/f4f/f4f-3-detail-specification.pdf lists the armor plate for the F4F-3 to be 155 lbs., but it doesn't specify what is included in that number.

When did armor protection and self-sealing tanks become standard on fighter aircraft? For instance, the Gloster Gladiator did not have either, if I'm not mistaken, nor did the Seversky P-35, and I'm not sure, but I don't think the Curtiss P-36 did, either, so it looks like it was immediately...

The whole premise of the Zero was to make it as light as possible. They didn't put in any armor protection for the pilot, nor did they use self-sealing gas tanks. An ejection seat, even if available at the time the aircraft was designed, would have been considered an unnecessary weight increase.