wuzak
Captain
Sure there weren't some Britons and Anglo-Saxons involved as well?
Qualities that made for a great aircraft that don't show up in performance stats.
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Sure there weren't some Britons and Anglo-Saxons involved as well?
Shortround6
Major General
Some of these drastic changes were things like relocating the radiator from the belly under/behind the pilot to under the engine in the nose.
Note early and not very good carb intake. Note shrouded exhausts (poor exhaust thrust). and this picture might not be the original form of the XP-40.
XP-40 in the wind tunnel.
Please note the almost total lack of a carburetor inlet. A few descriptions claim they were using the space around the .50 cal gun barrels as the carb inlets.
Most, if not all, of the changes that turned the under 300mph XP-40 into the 330-342mph XP-40 had to do with the engine and the associated parts Radiators/oil cooler/ intake scoops/ducts and exhaust.
Unless someone can come up with a good source of changes to the airframe (new airfoil, major change in wing area, major change in tail arrangement. etc) that would significantly reduce drag I think we can take the accounts of the time as true and the P-40 (at east through the"C") was little different than than P-36.
And since most good sources discount the claim that the P-40Q used a different airfoil than the early P-40s (the wings were clipped) then even the P-40Q used pretty much the same wing as the P-36 with suitable structural modifications to handle the increased load/stress.
Whoa, this is getting a little confusing! According to GreyGhost, Leroy's boys had been playing around with a G-50 paper airplane since '38, yet Darren here is implying that they cooked it up from scratch in '41 to meet BuAer's new requirements. Barrett, you listening? Can you weigh in on this and clarify the issue? Thanks.
Cheers,
Wes
Sorry guy, losers don't get to define history.
GrauGeist
Generalfeldmarschall zur Luftschiff Abteilung
Yeah, that's an interesting take on the development, to be sure.
Interestingly enough, if we look at Grumman's Naval fighter development between 1931 and 1945, we'll see that there was only one lapse, and that was between the F6F and the F8F.
The issues that Grumman encountered were that the Wright R-2600 would be too much torque for the airframe, the mainwing could be lower on the fuselage because Grumman was incorporating a hydraulic undercarriage (the manual gear caused far too many issues) and a host of other points.
So in the end, yes, the G-50/XF6F became a different aircraft BUT it was the intended successor to the F4F before the F4F ever saw combat.
Wait, they were going to stick a 2600 on an F4F? Why not just stick a tail hook on a GeeBee R-2 and call it done? Oh, but I guess they did eventually do just that, and called it a Bearcat, right?
Like smashing Lew Slagle's fore arm when he lost hold of the crank as he was lifting off from Henderson Field under fire from strafing Zeros. Which left him low, slow, and dirty in a perforated Wildcat with a useless left arm and a sky full of the Emperor's finest.
Cheers,
Wes
yulzari
Staff Sergeant
The 1870 War found that only 1/3 of French soldiers could readily understand or speak French. Most spoke the local patois which could be very different. Or Breton, Basque, Catalan, Alsatian German, Italian etc. Post war there was a huge investment in education with a national curriculum and for it to be in French. Well Government French i.e. Ile de France French. Even now in French schools there is a an official 'English' which catches out native English speakers who have their English work continually corrected.
But then good English is only spoken by middle class Scots, Swedes, Danes and Dutch.
Along with that they cultivated the idea that not speaking the official standard French is a sign of poor education, this is a major obstacle to the French learning other languages as they fear making a mistake is a sign of being stupid. The notion that good English is spoken by middle class Scots was another invention of middle class Scots. Though around Inverness they do speak with almost perfect "BBC" English, devoid of any accent at all.
Ok rather than just go round and round and round and round with this very long sidetrack, I'm going to try to raise the signal to noise ratio a little.
My understanding of the story is a bit more convoluted. According to Don Berlin himself, before they came up with the P-40, they had passed through another unsuccessful stage, the turbocharged YP-37. A rather more radical departure from the original P-36 design, of which 11 were manufactured. It managed to go 340 mph at 20,000 feet, which is decent performance for the time, but only when the turbo-supercharger was working. Which was intermittent at best.
This too has the same wings. But is it a P-36?
The added length was due to an experimental turbo-supercharger. Don Berlin... we all know who he is right? Said of the plane that "The YP-37 was a nice looking ship, but they were not reliable. The [turbo] supercharger was simply not working, and we didn't have time to develop that too."
But it was just on the edge of a wild success for Curtiss, and he saw the potential with the in-line engines:"The Allisons on the XP/YP-37's were designed as sea level engines, with altitude power to be obtained by use of the turbo-supercharger. So, in the urgency of the times, I talked the Allison people into giving us an estimate of the altitude power which could be obtained with the V-1710 if they were to step up the diffuser [blower] rpm', using it for obtaining rated power at some altitude. They replied that, at 10,000 feet, this would give 1050 hp. Inasmuch as Air Corps' specifications at that time called for performance at 10,000 feet, this was great."
Thus the birth of the XP-40 you show above, with the oddly placed radiator scoop and lack of supercharger intakes. Don Berlin wrote the materials division at Wright Field a letter estimating performance of 350 mph at 15,000 feet, with an additional cost of $19,394.75 to install the new engine, plus larger wheels, longer struts, a modified oil tank and changes to the wing structure which would cost a further $4,502.25 per unit.
This roughly doubled the unit cost from the P-36 at $23,000 to the new P-40 at ~$46,000, though that cost would go down somewhat during the long production run of the P-40. Please note this cost increase is before the NACA testing and further subsequent changes.
Shortly afterward, in a performance competition at Wright Field on February 25 1939 against the P-35, Seversky AP-4, XP-39, XP-38, and the Hawk-75-R and XP-37. The XP-40 outperformed the others sufficiently of the new aircraft design was sufficient for the Army Air Corps to order a $12 million contract. I think it's significant toward this (petty, extremely drawn out) debate that Curtiss fielded both the Hawk 75 and the YP-37.
By this time, Berlin had already had the radiator on the XP-40 moved to the front, improving speed though it was still apparently not quite ready for prime time. The second series of changes which created the actual P-40 was initiated by none other than Hap Arnold. Again, per Don Berlin:
"General H.H. Arnold, Chief of the Army Air Corps, called Curtiss Vice-Prsident Burdette Wright and me to Washington for a meeting. He told us that he was not going to release the contract to us until we told him what we were going to do to meet our performance guarantees. Our guarantee of high speed as given for the competition was 360 mph at 15,000 feet."
"...he told us that Dr. George Lewis, head of NACA at Langley, had suggested that the XP-40 be sent to NACA for tests of how to get the desired performance. Now, sending an aircraft into a government facility to test on their own schedule and ideas of change, can be disastrous for the manufacturer who has a contract delivery schedule to meet. So, I got off a letter to Captain Ben Kelsey who was then project officer on pursuit aircraft, and outlined the tests I had contemplated. Kelsey in turn wrote to NACA setting forth these tests as desired by the Materiel Division. That was on March 29, 1939, and that is how we were able to move so rapidly."
Berlin goes on to describe how he actually supervised the NACA tests, which were completed in a month, and was so pleased with the improvements he brazenly increased the high speed guarantee to 365 mph in the process. Which was a goal they wouldn't achieve in level flight for wartime P-40s until 1942. But it was enough to impress Hap Arnold who immediately released the contract.
The changes may appear incremental to those who wish to perceive them that way, but they doubled the production cost, substantially improved speed while increasing wing-loading and handling (thus changing the tactical profile of the aircraft) changed the dimensions substantially, and were classified as a different aircraft by Curtiss, by the designer Don Berlin, and by the US government. The engine change was substantial, the subsequent tweaking while incremental, also added up to major changes to the fuselage of the aircraft and to it's performance envelope. It was of the Hawk family, and had clear and substantial lineage to the P-36, but in my opinion it was clearly a different plane.
Your mileage may vary.
S
This is of course yet another segue but at the risk of delving too far into a subject definitely very distinct from aircraft, this is my field and I feel the need to chime in. Feel free to ignore the rest of this post if you have zero interest in medieval history. For those who do (some posts in the thread seem to indicate a few might) here is a free primer on travel in the medieval and Early Modern world in Europe.
First let me be clear that I definitely agree with the main point the two of you were making, per Swampyankee that "The larger European countries are far less homogeneous than some suppose". This is definitely the case, it was very hard (and in detail, quite ugly) work forcing a large kingdom to become a truly centralized State and linguistically, if not culturally, homogeneous. This process is a bit further along in places like England, Spain and France where powerful monarchs, with the help of vast overseas wealth, were hard at work trying to consolidate it for many centuries, than in for example Germany or Italy which weren't even unified until the third quarter of the 19th Century.
And the second point - there were and still are many many regional dialects is also very true. Really it wasn't until radio, television and now the internet started homogenizing accents that we really began to see true flattening of regional dialects into one consistent national language, ala BBC English or RAI Italian. But the notion that people didn't move around much until the age of the railroad is patently false, at least for most of Continental Europe.
Travel in the pre-industrial world
I really can't speak for England (though more on that in a second) since that is not my area of research, but in Italy, and Central and Northern Europe, you would be really surprised how much at least some people did in fact move around. The three most mobile estates in pre-Industrial Europe were the Church, the aristocracy, and the burghers. Nobles moved for marriages, wars, fosterage / family alliances, for pilgrimages, due to exile and for diplomacy (for example as representative of a princes court). Church men moved for work, to go to schools and universities, due to being assigned to this or that bishopric or abbey, to meet in ecumenical council and synods, as diplomats, and for pilgrimages. But of the three the burghers are the least known but probably the most important.
Certain parts of Europe were surprisingly urbanized going quite far back. By the time of plate armor and stone castles, roughly 40% of the population of Lombardy and 35% of Tuscany were considered 'urbanized' either in the large City States like Milan, Florence, Venice, Sienna, Brescia, Genoa, Padua etc. etc., or in smaller market towns (really villages with markets) that surrounded them. The same was true in the Rhineland, in the foothills of the Alps, in Flanders, in the towns of Catalonia and the Dalmatian coast, along the northern fringe of Europe on the southern Baltic coastline (the Hanseatic League), in the part of northern Poland then called Prussia, and in the Czech / Slovak areas of Bohemia.
Portrait of Oswald Krel, of the Grand Ravensburg Brotherhood, flanked by the wildman or woodwose, sort of a medieval "bigfoot" character symbolic of the perils of the open road. The Grand Ravensburg company was a late medieval trading company encompassing 20 cities in Spain, France, Italy, Burgundy and the Holy Roman Empire by the 1450's.
Roaming merchants
In the towns and market villages, the two main sources of mobility were mercantile activity and the craft guilds. Merchants traveled very far and wide indeed and most medium sized towns had commercial embassies or 'factories' in far off lands. The Italian city-states like Genoa, Venice and Florence had permanent bases in Turkey, Egypt, the Crimea, Syria, Persia and China where 14th Century Genoese cemeteries were found in the 1950s. Italian merchants published books like the pratica della mercatura which outlined all the perils of traveling on the Silk Road from Italy to China, down to the tare weights charged in Persia to the riddles one might be challenged with on the road. If you click that link you'll notice the book also includes a glossary of words in several languages. The merchants of this period also had maps which pretty accurately showed the entire route such as the Catalan Atlas of 1375.
Nor was this confined to Italy, German Hanseatic towns had permanent trading posts from Lisbon in Portugal to Veliky Novgorod in Russia. And to hold on to these lucrative outposts they had to be able to project force at these long distances when necessary. When the King of England dared to try to loot the warehouses of the Hanseatic of quarter in London in the 1460's, the (at the time) German Free Cities of Danzig, Hamburg and Lübeck declared war, imposed a blockade, and forced the English to capitulate and restore their rights, which aside from numerous trade monopolies included control of an entire district and the management of one of the gates into the city of London and in Boston and a couple of other towns.
Roaming craftsmen
An even bigger source of circulation of people movement though was from the working classes - the craftsmen. In Central Europe, in Italy, in Flanders and most of the other urbanized zones, after an apprenticeship a craftsman (or in some cases, woman) had to leave town and roam the roads for a fixed period, from either a year and a day to three years and a day. This was called the "waltz", or Wanderjahre in German. Academics in English call it "Journeyman years". It was the way that the printing press spread so rapidly from 1450 to 1500, and how many other minor but important innovations like the vice, the draw plate, the water powered paper mill, the water-powered trip hammer and bellows and so on. More pertinent to the discussion this lead hundreds of thousands of young men, and a few women, to roam very widely indeed. German and Czech journeymen were recorded as far away from home as Portugal, Sicily, Finland and Russia, and not a few hired on to Mamluk and Ottoman rulers for temporary contracts, as certain crafts like masons were in high demand. It's also where a lot of personal relationships were forged, Albrecht Dürer's Wanderjahre lasted four years and took him from his home in Nuremberg as far away as Strasbourg and Amsterdam.
This contributed to a rather heavy demographic churn in urban populations. One study showed that 75% of the citizens of Vienna in 1500 (about half of the population were citizens) were born outside of Austria. Even small territorial (as in, not independent) towns like Munich had as much as 25% foreign populations around the same time.
An early 17th Century map of Warsaw, depicting raft and boat traffic on the Vistula. From the fantastic Braun and Hogenberg Atlas.
Peasants and Englishmen
Even peasants traveled more than you might think, at least the free ones. Local and regional fairs like the famous Champagne fairs in France brought people from all over to their markets, usually and especially via the interior rivers and canals, which were by far the easiest way to move heavy goods like crops. For example in Poland it was routine every year for peasants as far away as the Krakow region to take their rye or wheat by raft all the way (roughly 600 km) down the Vistula river to Danzig / Gdansk where it would be sold, processed and / or shipped overseas. They had a kind of rowdy race along the way as the first rafts to arrive got the best prices for their crop. Peasants also traveled as fishermen and miners, and for the usual reasons of war, pilgrimage, exile and marriage.
And finally, though I should again stipulate I have really have never studied England or the British Isles, given the large number of Hanseatic regulations, meeting minutes and letters complaining about roaming English and Scotish merchants and itinerant peddlers in the Baltic, and the two wars the Hanse fought trying to keep them out of the region in the 15th Century, plus the substantial presense of English mercenaries as far away as Portugal and Italy, and the existence of corporations such as the Company of Merchant Adventurers of London (chartered officially in 1407 by mentioned in documents as early as 1305), I would guess that at least some of the English were traveling far and wide as well.
The first TL : DR is that people traveled quite restlessly in pre-industrial times. It's almost a constant, going back to the Bronze Age and before. Periods where they did not are actually the outliers. In the medieval period it was a very important way that technology - including military technologies- circulated.
Local, regional and international languages
The reality of languages is just one of those contradictory things - they were both parochial and cosmopolitan. They had local dialects a plenty, and those became increasingly important with the elevation of the vernacular into a literary written language especially again in the 14th Century (with folks like Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, the so called Three Fountains of Italy, but also equivalents in many other countries including Chaucer in England) . But the Church and to a slightly lesser extent, the nobility had Latin as an international language. They also developed regional and international trade languages. Along the North Sea and the Baltic, they used a dialect called Low German, which sounds a bit like some early forms of English as Eddie Izzard tried to prove with mixed success. Further south, the Imperial Chancery of the Holy Roman Empire adopted High German as a trade language for trans-alpine commerce and trade throughout Eastern Europe. Meanwhile the Rhine had it's own trade dialect which combined elements of French and Dutch and so on, which all the mighty trading towns on that river spoke, even as they also spoke French, Alsatian, and their own dialect, like Kölsch which is a private language of Cologne, still spoken today.
On a larger scale they had the mediterranean pidgin language or trade dilaect called "Mediterranean Lingua Franca" by academics today but known more commonly as Sabir when it was still in wide use. Derived of a combination of mainly French, Berber, Greek, Spanish and Arabic, it fell out of use in the 19th Century.
So the second TL : DR is that most people spoke one of thousands of different local dialects, but a lot of them also spoke at least some of a second language, in many cases that was a regional or international trade dialect. Some of these later became national languages when a true State finally did get hammered into shape, such as High German for the German Empire.
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Couple of links I forgot to drop in, Alsatian dialect
Alsatian dialect - Wikipedia
this is a pretty decent Wiki on Sabir, the Mediterranean Trade Language
Mediterranean Lingua Franca - Wikipedia
Eddie Izzard tries to buy a cow in Oold English from a native Frisian (Low German) speaker
Eddie Izzard buys a cow in Old English
Alsatian dialect - Wikipedia
this is a pretty decent Wiki on Sabir, the Mediterranean Trade Language
Mediterranean Lingua Franca - Wikipedia
Eddie Izzard tries to buy a cow in Oold English from a native Frisian (Low German) speaker
Eddie Izzard buys a cow in Old English
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I think it's also a major barrier for the spread of the influence of the French language, which is very important to French people (at least - those known personally to me who are a fairly large number). They are so hyper-critical of the dialects of French Canadians, Franco-Belgians, French-Swiss, Franco-Carribean, and French speaking Africans that they alienate them.
Living forty miles from the Quebec border, I've observed an interesting shift in the language over the last five decades. In their increasing confidence in the strength of their culture and pride in their "Frenchness", our neighbors to the north seem to be drifting away from the Quebecois dialect I remember from my youth and closer to the Parisian French I was taught in school.
In the early 60s I was told I had to learn French as it was the lingua franca of international trade, diplomacy, and academia. My aunt and uncle in the foreign service made themselves understood in French in Taipei, Jakarta, Karachi, and Rangoon. Seems not to be so anymore.
Cheers,
Wes
C'mon, we've bucked this rivet so long the head is splitting, the dimple is collapsing inward, and stress cracks are appearing in the underlying structure.
Cheers,
Wes
I agree, I just noticed it came up yet again - but I'm emphasizing the word opinion, on the basis of which I tried to contextualize it earlier. Some (other) people don't seem to think you are allowed to have one.
I really do also think P-51B and P-51A are different planes too! But it's just my opinion.
What's the difference between a scholar and a fanatic? My history professor said it was the insistence on unconditional surrender.
Cheers,
Wes
On my last job in France I worked with a coordinator, she was a young charming and enthusiastic young woman. She said she wanted to learn English which is easier to say than to do. She had learned English and Italian but since I spoke French she never felt confident enough to speak in English. So one day for a laugh I started speaking Italian which I speak enough to get by but nowhere near as good as hers, after a few days of messing about in Italian she lost her fear of making mistakes herself. In the next three months her English came on in leaps and bounds, not only in conversation but I could fill in the technical an industry specific words that no course can teach. She never did grasp the concept that there are many different versions of English and provided the are understood and unambiguous they can all be correct.
She would have been confounded by my boot camp company. Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Downeast Maine, with voices from Gospel Hollow NC, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Philly, Duluth, Laramie, San Jose, and SanFran Chinatown. We all learned to speak Nav intelligibly.
Cheers,
Wes
I think what I meant to say that the numbers increased massively with the railways and the industry that grew up after they were built. Of course people have always moved but it is generally the young and mainly young men, once women have children it became much more difficult. There were always people left who kept the dialect in a village and town alive. Generally you need a migrant population of over 10% to have any cultural effect on a population, the new arrivals pic up the local dialect. Two places I know were affected differently by human migration in the UK. Middlesbrough was built from scratch with people from all over Europe mainly GB and Ireland, it has its own distinctive dialect Corby in the midlands had a steelworks built by A Scottish company in the 1930s which brought its own workers, to this day Glaswegian Scots with all its idioms is used widely in the town.
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