Pleased to announce some updates to the website.
The Beta version of the Imperial Japanese Army Air Arm appendix has been uploaded while Version 1.0 of the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Arm appendix has replaced the Beta version previously posted.
Updates, revisions and corrections to the Royal Navy Air Arm, Kriegsmarine, Italian Army, Marine National and Spanish Armada appendices have also been made.
In other news, Part 4 of the Drake's Drum series
Drake's Drum: The Horizon of Our Hopes will soon have reached the first draft stage and I'm hoping it will be ready for Beta readers by December. It will complete the story, bringing it up to the first decade of the 21
st Century.
Some eye candy…
The following pictures are Photoshopped
The Q2M
Taiyo was a Mitsubishi design for a patrol bomber for the IJN to replace the Kyushu Q1W in that role and the Mitsubishi G4M in the torpedo attack role.. In OTL it never got off the drawing board. In
Drake's Drum, it does…
The Ki-97 was another OTL Mitsubishi design that didn't get off the drawing board, this time for a transport aircraft. It was based on the wings, engines and tail surfaces of the Japanese Army's Ki-67
Hiryu bomber.
A flight of fancy… In the
Drake's Drum timeline the onset of the Second World War is delayed and so the development of civil aviation advances more rapidly in the early 1940s than it did in OTL. Consequently Mitsubishi develop a new transport aircraft and like the Ki-97 and the Ki-57 of OTL they use their latest bomber design (in this case the G4M 'Betty') as a basis.
The Tachikawa Ki-94 II was an OTL high altitude fighter that in OTL only got as far as the mock up stage.
Another flight of fancy… The Kawasaki Ki-164 a fictional design based on the OTL Ki-64. Instead of the tandem engine set-up of that aircraft (which flew in prototype form in OTL) the Ki-164 uses the Yokosuka Ha-74 (YE-3B) experimental 'X' block engine which was under development at wars end in OTL. There is an excellent article
here about the YE3B and you can read about its TTL development path in the aircraft engines appendix at the Drake's Drum website.
L to R The Kawasaki Ki-64 (flew as a prototype in OTL), the Kawasaki Ki-88 (design only in OTL), the Kawasaki Ki-164 (conjectural design from the
Drake's Drum timeline.
The Kawanishi H11K 'Soku.' In OTL it was to transport troops and cargo from Japan to the far flung Pacific outposts and only got as far as the mock-up stage.