Recent content by Stephan Wilkinson

They were a lot smaller than that single-bank radial in the artist's P-38 rendering.

The artist's rendering under "P-38 With Radials Is a Bad Idea" is pretty amusing. The artist seems to have used mid-1930s DC-2 Wrights and cowlings as his radial ideals, while properly nacelled R-2800s were in fact very compact, small in diameter and of course powerful. "P-38 With R-2800s Is a...

But wait, there's more. I have found my original reference, and it is the very authoritative, 606-page "America's Hundred Thousand: U. S. Production Fighters of World War II," by Francis H. Dean. To quote from page 402: "The cannon were controlled by the pilot and could be set to fire forward...

Good points. I think I'll figure this one is a myth.

Somewhere I read--can't remember where--that a Black Widow's belly-pod cannons could be deflected by the pilot a quarter of a degree left, right, up or down (which minuscule amount would, of course, have a substantial effect on where the fire went a hundred or more yards out from the airplane)...

Zero answers after 250-odd views at WIX, so maybe you folks can help... I have read that the idea of putting supercharged but non-turbocharged engines on the P-61 was Jack Northrop's idea (presumably to save the weight and space of the turbos and their big intercoolers), and I have read that...

The SCR-720 was hardly "added." It was the raison d'etre for the P-61 right from the outset. Whether or not somebody postulated putting guns in the nose is irrelevant. It was a dumb idea, and it's unimaginable why any engineer who knew what nightfighting was about would do it is hard to...

Not believeable, since the original-original "concept for the P-61" required the nose to be filled not with guns but with the radar dish and ancillary equipment. There never was a P-61 concept that considered ordnance in the nose in place of the radar.

Steve Hinton recently told me that, like many powerful fighters, you take off in a Bearcat in a tail-low attitude. It's not a matter of getting the tail up, then rolling forward some more, then feeding in some back stick...an airplane like this simply flies off the runway on its own, and then...

I'm guessing, without any evidence to back up my musings, that no P-61 ever engaged in combat with the dorsal turret anywhere but locked straight ahead and fired usually by the pilot, though the gunner could certainly have done it as well. I have never read of a combat with the turret displaced...

Also substantial added cooling drag.

I'm sorry to have started a thread that I thought would be interesting and to me informative but that has turned out to be contentious and argumentative. I think I'll just check out here and go on my way.

As I said, my mission is not to argue all of your and other posters excellent points, it's ultimately to assess them and decide if anything is to alter what I plan to write, which it very may well. I'm not trying to play a guessing game or a who-knows-more contest, it's to elicit replies and to...

"There was military doctrine to use assault gliders into the early 50s and we might have seen them in Korea. Don't forget the Chase CG-14, several were ordered in 1947." That's fine, but they _didn't_ use 'em in Korea, and the only way the last-gasp Chase worked was when they put engines on it...

Your suggestions are all interesting and useful, and I'm not going to waste your time by arguing about them, which wasn't my original intent anyway. What I'm looking for is the "weapons system" that I've totally forgotten about, and when I write the lead of the article to say, "Never in history...