No Spitfire?

[nuuumannn]

lying an inferior aircraft means you only win if you have the advantage, how is a A6M, Hurricane, Spit MkII, 109E or P40 going to catch let alone attack and defeat a Spit XIV, P51D, P47M/N if the pilot of those planes was aware they were being attacked?, they won't.

Again, name a situation, name a context, just saying the best aircraft always wins is proven not always to be the case. Again I'll say it. The Bf 109's superiority made NO DIFFERENCE to the outcome of the Battle of Britain. The Defiant's, Gladiator's and Hurricane's inferiorities made NO DIFFERENCE to the outcome.

Context is everything.

 

[pbehn]

Where would the many more Hurricanes come from, Supermarine?, the British had an excess of Hurricanes, it was pilots they were short of, if they fought the BoB with only Hurricanes they would have had less pilots because the Hurri had a higher loss ratio. What Park would have done over France is irrelevant because he wasn't in charge, LM was, the RAF would have been in an even worse position because LM would have leaned on France regardless of what planes he had, instead of loosing around 1000 mostly Spitfires he would have lost many more Hurricanes. Not having Spitfires means Hawker is flat out making Hurricanes so no Typhoon or Tempest, what is the RAF going to fight the war with, Hurricanes till 1945?.

Supermarine didn't make Spitfires at West Bromwich, the government did Supermarine supervised with Vickers. If there is no Spitfire, you have to do things differently, like make more Hurricanes and sell or give them to the French, who had thousands of pilots.

 

[nuuumannn]

At least he's thinking in context...

 

[pbehn]

The Castle Bromwich operation was started in 1936, at what point was it decided to build Spitfires there?

The Hurricane go the metal wings in 1938 or early 39? many of the early Hurricanes got metal wings so no, the Hurricane was not built of tube and fabric.
The fuselage used a tube frame and it was fabric covered from the rear of cockpit to the tail. It was metal covered from the cockpit forward, still with the tube frame.

A big problem getting the Spitfire into production was the constant changing of small details.

Started in 1939 but was still being done when the BoB started according to Wiki An all-metal, stressed-skin wing of duraluminium (a DERD specification similar to AA2024) was introduced in April 1939 and was used for all of the later marks.[11] "The metal skinned wings allowed a diving speed that was 80 mph (130 km/h) higher than the fabric-covered ones. They were very different in construction but were interchangeable with the fabric-covered wings; one trials Hurricane, L1877, was even flown with a fabric-covered port wing and metal-covered starboard wing. The great advantage of the metal-covered wings over the fabric ones was that the metal ones could carry far greater stress loads without needing so much structure beneath."[38] Several fabric-wing Hurricanes were still in service during the Battle of Britain, although a good number had had their wings replaced during servicing or after repair. Changing the wings required only three hours work per aircraft.[38]

 

[Koopernic]

Note that table from the same doc notes that 'roughness (including joints and rivets)' for Hurricane is just ~0.4% of the total drag at 100 ft/s. Certainly not worth 22 mph on a 315-320 mph aircraft.



Let's not get carried away. Defiant was not with a low-drag wing, not with a low-drag cooling system, tail wheel was still hanged in the breeze. The 'very high airframe tollerances' line looks like taken from B-P sales pitch.
Much more firepower - perhaps, though the 'The guns could be depressed for ground attack.' sentence at Wikipedia for P.94 is too good to be true.



Cube root law now applies to drag, too?



Twice the firepower, because 12 = 2x8? It will dearly need more lift, since it starts as heavier aircraft.

1 Defiant/P.94 showed good production tolerances, flush riveting, no gaps, nice cowling, wing fillets. The advantages of fully covered wheels have more impact than a tail wheel in the breeze (non retractable tail wheel is something that Spitfire had as well). The Defiant/P.94 would have had non of the disadvantages of the Hurricane except a thickish wing but it was at least of advanced NACA type. It had advantages of high tolerance production. The fully covered main wheels probably have as much impact on speed as a thick wings.

Whereas the Hurricane had 35% more parasitic drag than the Spitfire the P.94 should have only 10%-15% with the thicker wing by far the main component of that with compensation from the full retraction and the ability to carry Hispano canon without bulges.

2 There is no Boulton and Paul sales pitch lie (didn't they build James Watts first steam engine). They built a P.94 test bed using actual components such as wing and engine installation so their speed estimates are therefore close. It was going to be much faster than Hurricane or Defiant but not quite as fast as Spitfire. Likely not even 10mph.

3 Boulton and Paul offered either 12 x 303 Browning or 4 x Hispano 20mm with 4 x Browning. That's close to twice the firepower of a Spitfire V and gave P.94 the fire power of a Beaufighter. You don't believe the P.94 could have depressed its guns, well there is room in the wings to change the elevation/depression markedly and you are really calling BP liars. AFAIKT it only applied to the Brownings but the Hispano would have been ground adjustable.

4 Cube root law applies to drag as well as power. Speed varies inversely with cube root of drag or varies proportionately with cube root of engine power.

5 You are saying P.94 didn't have a 'low drag cooling system'. How do you know? There could be a boundary layer bypass or splitter in the coolant radiator (like Me 109F) and its deep shape itself means less of the boundary layer effects the radiator inside. Placing the oil cooler in the nose position was done for a reason, Boulton and Paul clearly could have run the oil lines to the rear radiator at some cost in weight.

The P.94 should have been easy to make. Defiant tail was made by attaching the stringers to sheet metal and wrapping it around the ribs of the tai.

 

[fastmongrel]

There is no Boulton and Paul sales pitch lie (didn't they build James Watts first steam engine).

Different company Mathew Boulton built Watts engines though there might have been a connection Boulton isn't a very common name. Quite interesting factoid Mathew Boultons grandson invented the Aileron.

 

[tomo pauk]

1 Defiant/P.94 showed good production tolerances, flush riveting, no gaps, nice cowling, wing fillets. The advantages of fully covered wheels have more impact than a tail wheel in the breeze (non retractable tail wheel is something that Spitfire had as well). The Defiant/P.94 would have had non of the disadvantages of the Hurricane except a thickish wing but it was at least of advanced NACA type. It had advantages of high tolerance production. The fully covered main wheels probably have as much impact on speed as a thick wings.

Whereas the Hurricane had 35% more parasitic drag than the Spitfire the P.94 should have only 10%-15% with the thicker wing by far the main component of that with compensation from the full retraction and the ability to carry Hispano canon without bulges.

2 There is no Boulton and Paul sales pitch lie (didn't they build James Watts first steam engine). They built a P.94 test bed using actual components such as wing and engine installation so their speed estimates are therefore close. It was going to be much faster than Hurricane or Defiant but not quite as fast as Spitfire. Likely not even 10mph.

1 - Manufacturers are doing the lovely fit & finish when making aircraft in dozens and low hundreds. Supermarine did it, too, together with nice cowling and wing filets. Once the AM was asking for high hundreds and thousand of fighters, fit & finish quality dropped.
2 - Everyone learned how to be faster than Hurricane by late 1930s. The 'P.94 test bed' is just a nice name for turretless and unarmed Defiant. Having 12 LMGs or 4 Hispano + 4 LMGs means greater drag than 8 LMGs. The later proposal is too much guns for the engine power installed, even if it is the Merlin XX. That engine, together with better streamlining (including internal bullet proof glass, wheel well covers and fully retractable tail wheel), was making Spitfire III going 390-400 mph, whereas the P.94 was offered as a 360 mph fighter.

3 Boulton and Paul offered either 12 x 303 Browning or 4 x Hispano 20mm with 4 x Browning. That's close to twice the firepower of a Spitfire V and gave P.94 the fire power of a Beaufighter. You don't believe the P.94 could have depressed its guns, well there is room in the wings to change the elevation/depression markedly and you are really calling BP liars. AFAIKT it only applied to the Brownings but the Hispano would have been ground adjustable.

4 Cube root law applies to drag as well as power. Speed varies inversely with cube root of drag or varies proportionately with cube root of engine power.

3 - Spitfire was also capable to carry with 4 Hispanos and 4 LMGs: link
In practice, having such a heavy guns' battery inflicted too much of performance, especially climb. Let's burden the already heavy and draggy Defiant/P.94 with such a battery and send the pilots in the harm's way, so the Bf-109F and Fw-190 pliots can rack up the scores? I'm not calling the BP liars, they will not be 1st nor last to over-asses their product.
4 - Might be.

5 You are saying P.94 didn't have a 'low drag cooling system'. How do you know? There could be a boundary layer bypass or splitter in the coolant radiator (like Me 109F) and its deep shape itself means less of the boundary layer effects the radiator inside. Placing the oil cooler in the nose position was done for a reason, Boulton and Paul clearly could have run the oil lines to the rear radiator at some cost in weight.

The P.94 should have been easy to make. Defiant tail was made by attaching the stringers to sheet metal and wrapping it around the ribs of the tai.

Low-drag radiators had one thing in common - that a good part of their frontal area was not added to the frontal area of aircraft. In practice, most of the designers were using half-burried radiators on their A/C powered by liquid cooled engines (Spitfire, Bf 109E etc, Me 110/210/410, Soviet and Italian fighters, P-51, Ki-61, P-38, P-39, P-63; some did it better than the others, though), or the radiators were in front or within of a 'fixed' part of airframe (Mosquito, Fw 190D/Ta-152, Ju 88, Whilrwind). in order to keep the frontal area as small as possible
Hurricane, Defiant and Kestrel-powered Master were using radiators that were fully outside of fuselage (Defiant used separate radiators for oil and coolant systems), and we have from the table you've posted above that Hurricane had a worse cooling drag than Spitfire by 15% - despite the Hurricane having sorts of a boundary layer splitter, vs. the Spitfire that it had none.
Both Defiant and Hurricane would've probably gained some speed with 'beard' radiators, the chage worked for Typhoon and P-40 vs. the respective prototypes.

 

[fastmongrel]

There's also the problem of heating all the guns. A wing full of guns will need a lot of hot air ducting.

 

[tomo pauk]

There's also the problem of heating all the guns. A wing full of guns will need a lot of hot air ducting.

On Defiant, too? You can't be serious.

 

[PAT303]

Supermarine didn't make Spitfires at West Bromwich, the government did Supermarine supervised with Vickers. If there is no Spitfire, you have to do things differently, like make more Hurricanes and sell or give them to the French, who had thousands of pilots.

You haven't answered my question, make more Hurricanes where, have supermarine make them?, what about pilots, selling Hurricanes to the French is not going to help you fight 109's and 190's over France Africa or the Med from 1941 onwards.

 

[PAT303]

Again, name a situation, name a context, just saying the best aircraft always wins is proven not always to be the case. Again I'll say it. The Bf 109's superiority made NO DIFFERENCE to the outcome of the Battle of Britain. The Defiant's, Gladiator's and Hurricane's inferiorities made NO DIFFERENCE to the outcome.

Context is everything.

The 109's flew into the most organised integrated air defense system the world had ever known at the time in 1940, how is the Hurricane going to go when the role is reversed from 1941 against far superior aircraft?. Like I said earlier, without the Spitfire England looses simply because any Hurricane crossing the channel is lost if engaged, any 109F or 190A coming back the other way can fly without fear of interception unless the Hurri is thousands of feet above and in front of it.

 

[fastmongrel]

On Defiant, too? You can't be serious.

The Defiant would fly so fast air friction would keep the guns hot.

 

[pbehn]

You haven't answered my question, make more Hurricanes where, have supermarine make them?, what about pilots, selling Hurricanes to the French is not going to help you fight 109's and 190's over France Africa or the Med from 1941 onwards.

If you aren't making Spitfires then you make them at Castle Bromwich the ground was broken in 1936 for it, or anywhere else, Spitfire production was dispersed around Southampton, at government expense.

 

[GrauGeist]

Pretty sure that if there's no Spitfire, the Air Ministry isn't going to let the Hurricane remain un-improved.
I keep seeing newer types of 109s compared to older Hurricane types.
From it's inception, the Hurricane was improved with later Marks, same as the 109 - the difference is, Britain introduced newer types, Germany did not and the 109 soldiered on.

So if there was no Spit and no immediate replacement, then most assuredly, the Hurricane would have evolved.

 

[pbehn]

You haven't answered my question, make more Hurricanes where, have supermarine make them?, what about pilots, selling Hurricanes to the French is not going to help you fight 109's and 190's over France Africa or the Med from 1941 onwards.

In fact many more Hurricanes was originally planned, from wiki "Hurricane production was increased as part of a plan to create a reserve of attrition aircraft as well as re-equip existing squadrons and newly formed ones such as those of the Auxiliary Air Force. Expansion scheme E included a target of 500 fighters of all types by the start of 1938. By the time of the Munich Crisis, there were only two fully operational RAF squadrons of the planned 12 to be equipped with Hurricanes.[44] By the time of the German invasion of Poland there were sixteen operational Hurricane squadrons as well as a further two more that were in the process of converting.[45]"

To me this is ridiculous. The RAF was sending planes elsewhere because it couldn't accept them quickly enough, and that is with hardly any Spitfires being produced. How long does it take an experienced pilot on Gladiators to transition to a Hurricane? Whether within the RAF or Whitehall someone didn't push it through. The Hurricane up to 1939s role was purely to train pilots with fabric wings and a fixed propeller they weren't a front line machine, by the time war came the vast majority would be worn out or written off anyway. Instead of producing them they produced Henleys and Battles waiting for a better engine, when the only role to be served was training. If Hawkers were producing aircraft faster than the RAF could manage to take them, how come the LW didn't have such problems? The Bf 109 started in production at about the same time.

The decision to start with the Griffon was made due to a Navy request, it could easily have been made by the RAF as soon as anyone found out what Germany was developing. To keep the Hurricane competitive more power from a bigger engine is an obvious route, work on the griffon was shelved for a while to work on the Vulture which was eventually shelved anyway. Start making the Griffon in Glasgow and you have a more powerful Hurricane and a reliable engine to put in the Tornado which with a two stage engine would be the front line all altitude fighter from 1942 and before that adapted for naval fighter, dive bomber, torpedo bomber by other manufacturers (specialists in maritime designs) as the Pr Spitfires were.

 

[Admiral Beez]

make more Hurricanes where, have supermarine make them?

Did Supermarine make much of anything? I had the impression that most Spitfires were made by parent company Vickers or outside contract firms.

Here's the extent of Supermarine's aircraft manufacturing capability.

And not so much, once the Germans visited.

 

[pbehn]

Did Supermarine make much of anything? I had the impression that most Spitfires were made by parent company Vickers or outside contract firms.

Here's the extent of Supermarine's aircraft manufacturing capability.

View attachment 617887

And not so much, once the Germans visited.

View attachment 617888

That is pretty much the case with any company making military stuff during a war. Their product depends on lots of stuff from elsewhere, the contracts can be cancelled on a whim and although you may own the factory, you cant insure it against the biggest risk of all, getting bombed. Supermarine was a small company it could design the Spitfire but didn't have the people to make it, but in 1936 who did?

 

[wuzak]

The decision to start with the Griffon was made due to a Navy request, it could easily have been made by the RAF as soon as anyone found out what Germany was developing. To keep the Hurricane competitive more power from a bigger engine is an obvious route, work on the griffon was shelved for a while to work on the Vulture which was eventually shelved anyway. Start making the Griffon in Glasgow and you have a more powerful Hurricane and a reliable engine to put in the Tornado which with a two stage engine would be the front line all altitude fighter from 1942 and before that adapted for naval fighter, dive bomber, torpedo bomber by other manufacturers (specialists in maritime designs) as the Pr Spitfires were.

Griffon development was paused during the BoB in order to concentrate on improving the Merlin for the Hurricane and Spitfire.

Griffon development started in 1938. Several revisions were made at some time in 1939 in order to repackage the engine to fit in a Spitfire airframe.

If the Spitfire didn't exist, I presume the person who suggested putting the Griffon in it would have, instead, proposed the Griffon Hurricane. The question is, would the Griffon need as an extensive repackaging to make it fit the Hurricane? Maybe 3-6 months saved off the time to get the Griffon into production?

 

[pbehn]

Griffon development was paused during the BoB in order to concentrate on improving the Merlin for the Hurricane and Spitfire.

Griffon development started in 1938. Several revisions were made at some time in 1939 in order to repackage the engine to fit in a Spitfire airframe.

If the Spitfire didn't exist, I presume the person who suggested putting the Griffon in it would have, instead, proposed the Griffon Hurricane. The question is, would the Griffon need as an extensive repackaging to make it fit the Hurricane? Maybe 3-6 months saved off the time to get the Griffon into production?

My point was that the Griffon was paused and the Vulture wasn't. The Vulture first ran in May 1937, purely with hindsight it would have been best to work on the Griffon and have Hawkers develop the Tornado around that, its first versions produced the BHP that the Vulture was specified for.

 

[wuzak]

My point was that the Griffon was paused and the Vulture wasn't. The Vulture first ran in May 1937, purely with hindsight it would have been best to work on the Griffon and have Hawkers develop the Tornado around that, its first versions produced the BHP that the Vulture was specified for.

Vulture development was also paused during the BoB, as was the Peregrine, Exe and Crecy. The Vulture, Peregrine and Exe were cancelled shortly after.