tomo pauk said:
Told you about size & scope...
The training scheme included the countries from the Commonwealth, thus increasing the pool of trained considerably. Whether a perspective flier was from Australia, India, S.Africa or Trinidad & Tobago, he sould be serving eiter RAF or other air forces/services and thus do it's part in waging the war against Axis.
Other forces would include the RCAF, RAAF, and RNZAF, correct?
Not just jam resistant stuff. RAF have had eg. the bombing radar, meaning that adwerse weather was still conductive to the bombing mission. The centrimetic radars' antennae could been installed in stremlined radomes, unlike the German antennae.
Didn't some early RAF radars use arrow-head antenna and receivers, later to dishes? Regardless, I agree the H2S/H2X were a significant advantage in principle (though from what I remember it had downsides based on terrain, buildings, presence of water and reflective materials, but nothing's perfect).
I'm curious about something regarding the H2S/H2X: Did the system include the ability to predict ballistics, or simply displayed an image?
I think that RN believed in torpedos as anti-ship weapons.
As did the USN, but they did use dive-bombers more liberally than the RAF did and (far as I know) they used decent sized armor piercing bombs right?
It took the Germans until perhaps 1941 to iron out the bugs from their air-launched torpedos, sometimes it is claimed the Italians helped them.
That's actually quite interesting. I do remember the Italians having some skill with electronics interestingly.
Soviet stuff worked okay.
Now that is a surprise...
The USAAC/AAF and USN first got the drop tanks, and then thinkered about virtues of escort.
No, actually the idea of escorts were thought of quite awhile back, back when the USAAF was the USAAS. Their ideas often did involve a rear-gunner, though there might have been other reasons for it; it did result in several designs in the form of the P-16/P-24/P-30, as well as the YFM-1 (which was a bomber-destroyer/escort).
No US air service wanted rear gunner on the escort fighter
Some saw it as an fighter that acted like a gunship that could maneuver like a fighter if it needed to. This wasn't necessarily favored by the fighter pilots (they figured maneuver was the key, and the P-16 and P-30 showed the gunners were useless), and some bomber-guys felt that "we should just stick these guns on the bombers, and get rid of the fighters (they were half right...)".
The drop tank idea might have started off as auxiliary tanks, but they probably didn't like the continuous drag penalty; even when drop-tanks were available, they still opposed them because they figured the pilots would just punch them off when they encountered enemy fighters, so they wanted it all on internal fuel.
They realized this would be expensive, and figured that the bomber force should be the primary priority, and while fighters would be useful, they were not essential. They didn't put much money into the idea.
For example, the P-39 carried either two or three radio sets in US service (compare that with Zero that was sometimes flown without a single radio set).
If I recall that was a problem we had in Vietnam with our F-4's and possibly other A/C types.
Reducing that to just a single set was one of things Soviets did on their P-39s.
From what I recall some Russian aircraft only had a transmitter on the leader and a receiver on all the others. Unfortunately, the wingmen could not tell their CO that somebody was on their tail.
The P-39, again, was supposed to cary 4 x 1000 rds for it's wing .30s.
That's a lot of bullets...
When an 1100-1200 HP aircraft is carrying 6-7 guns, many of those being heavy and using heavy ammo and heavy cradles, the performance (especially the RoF) can just go down.
Weight and recoil...
The tempo of launching sorties was far lower than what IJN was doing in 1942
What caused this particular problem?
at Midway, there was almost no cooperation between different squadrons attacking
Why such poor coordination?
This is not what I was thinking. The USAAC was pursuing hi-per engines in 1930s, investing the resources and time in that, instead supporting the engine companies.
But wouldn't the development of the hyper engines naturally provide money to the manufacturers?
We can just wonder how much better would've been the R-2800, R-2600 and V-1710 and other with government support from, say 1938 on.
That's probably true, but had they not been pursuing scads of designs and just focused on the O-1430/I-1430, and O-1230, as well as funding the V-1710, R-2600, R-2800 designs, they'd have been a great deal better.
The USN, on the other hand, was finnacialy supporting P&W and, if I'm not mistaken, Wright in order for those to came out with 2-stage supercharged versions of their engines for the needs of the USN.
That's true
pinehilljoe said:
I dont know how you drew this conclusion. The UK the USA had many legendary designers, Sydney Camm, Kelly Johnson, Ed Hieneman, Donnavan Berlin, to name only a few
I never criticized the UK, and while the US had Kelly Jonson and Ed Heinemann, Donovan Berlin was an excellent designer but was basically losing his skill with more advanced designs.
The USAAC itself had problems if I recall: They didn't have necessarily the sharpest minds managing some of the project offices, the engineers often had issues when it came to multi-disciplinary work. NACA was tasked with theoretical research, and had some sharp heads, but they seemed to focus their developments on producing a 550 mph piston aircraft and not looking further ahead, even despite the fact that some of them had been aware of or developed supersonic wind-tunnels already.
Shortround6 said:
Not sure what you mean by this. A number of the engines were stretched out over time, sticking with early engines leaves you under powered and waiting for the better ones leaves you with nothing to fight with for several years. Yes the US built some rather useless engines but those were in very small numbers, usually under a dozen or so.
I'm not saying we were wrong to develop new engines, the problem is there was little demand for inline engines after the NACA cowling came of age. As a result, developing loads of different designs does permit versatility, but it also means that with limited demand, they will all progress very slowly in development.
If you can remove the least capable, and proceed with the most, you can develop them faster on the funding.
The closest we came to real clanger was the Army/Continental V/O/IV-1430. Basically an Army design with Continental acting as the assembly shop.
Actually there was also the O-1230 as well and in a way it might have been better for it's weight. You're right about the Army dictating the design to them: I'm not sure if they had any leeway to tell the government "you know, we are working on this and we can actually do better..."
A factory was built to make it but produced radials (mainly for tanks?)
I never knew radials were used for anything other than aircraft.
Since the US was building and enlarging factories on a scale not seen elsewhere standardizing on one or two engines instead of eight wouldn't have changed things much.
To an extent you're right, but what I'm talking about is before the war...
The first USAAC attack aircraft designed as such and not converted from observation planes or something else
You might wish to read this
Original Series of USAAC/USAAF Attack Aircraft, particularly the entries for XA-2, and A-3.
As for the other designs I was talking about,
Boeing GA-1
http://air-boyne.com/rare-birds-boeing-ga-x/
Gallaudet DB-1
http://www.americancombatplanes.com/images/DB-1Bxn.jpg
https://pbycatalina.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/db-1.jpg
The Curtiss A-14/18 fell in there but was very high priced and actually didn't carry that great a bombload. 650-670lbs?
The cost was a problem, and for some reason I thought it could carry both 654 internally and externally simultaneously... no wonder I got that part wrong.
The DB-7 was NOT designed for the French. The USAAC had issued a requirement for a twin engine attack aircraft and Douglas responded with the DB-7
Okay, and the French and British bought it...
The prototype was supposed to be able to be fitted with a "Strafer" nose with two. 50 cal guns and six .30 cal guns. Bomb load was supposed to be 1200lbs.
I'd almost swear I saw 2400 on some figures, 2000 on others and 1764 on one or two.
ALL American attack planes fro m the A-8 on until the start of the war had double the number of guns as most dive bombers
I think they put a ridiculous amount of guns on their designs
and were fitted for the carriage of large numbers (relatively speaking) of 30lb fragmentation bombs, 10 on the A-8 and 20 on the A-17.
My observation seems to be that for land-based attack-planes/dive bombers of the time, they often carried large amounts of bombs of fairly small size; anti-ship dive-bombers usually carried either one or a small number of fairly large bombs: My impression was that for sinking ships, the goal was to put the biggest hole possible; for attacking people and tanks on the ground, you don't need much to kill people or wreck tanks, so you'd just carry a lot so you can kill loads of people and smash up lots of tanks.
The US was not ignoring ground support during the 30s, they were just approaching it from a different way than dive bombing.
I thought the A-8 and A-17 were dive-bombers?
The history of the gas turbine goes back to before WW I for industrial purposes.
The concept of turbines go back to ancient times.
The few prototypes built could barely keep themselves running let alone provide any power for pumps or generators. The main failing was the compressors were very in-efficient.
Actually the turbine blades were often flying stalled, with properly shaped blades they could extract the necessary energy at lower angles of attack and still leave power left over for thrust. The higher pressure ratio was also of great value.
In fact Dr Sanford Moss of turbocharger fame actually wrote his PhD thesis on gas turbines in 1903.
That I didn't know
And contrary to what seems intuitive, steam turbine makers more often than not made a hash out of axial flow compressors.
What do you mean they made a mess out of axial flow compressors?
nuuumannn said:
Russians were working on indigenous gas turbine engines during the war
If I recall they'd thought of ideas even in the 1930's.
With the capture of German equipment and the gift of British examples after the war, much effort was put into expanding their knowledge.
I could imagine, plus the British gave them the Nene...
As for altitude operations, not necessarily true about the USA being the only ones to put it into operational capability
No, but we did value the idea very early on: By 1934 we had flown the P-30 with a turbocharger in it, by 1938 or so we put them in a B-17, the P-38 was fitted with turbos off the bat (far as I know)
The Germans and the British carried out experiments pre war with pressurised aircraft
That's something I'd find interesting honestly.
the Germans putting their experience into practice with Ju 86 reconnaissance aircraft that were virtually untouchable at the time.
That design I know of, and it was remarkably effective.
Let's not forget the two-speed, two-stage supercharger Rolls-Royce developed for the Merlin and Griffon, which gave the aircraft fitted with the engines very good altitude performance.
That's a good point, but when you look at the P-38 it was high altitude off the bat...
Then there's the Ar 234, which was in small numbers, but again, unstoppable at altitude.
That's true, and was also the world's first jet bomber as I understand.
swampyankee said:
The Aircraft Engine Historical Society (enginehistory.org) has an article on Westinghouse's gas turbine development.
There's several entrees actually for Westinghouse
Pretty much the poster child for making a hash of it.
I thought the J30 and J34 were good engines